The Fawley Flame

 

At 16.05 minutes into Ken Russell's decidedly eccentric documentary In Search of the English Folk Song, local minstrel Bob Appleyard sings about a giant oil refinery on the Solent. 

The whole doc is worth a watch.

Hemel Hempstead as Winnerden Flats as Tambury

 

Quatermass 2 was filmed in Hemel Hempstead as it was being built (effectively a new town, populated with London overflow, glommed onto the side of an existing, much smaller and more charming town - which thereafter became known as Old Hemel). In the movie it doubles for the fictional town of Winnerden Flats. 

The new Hemel now dwarfs its older namesake, like a carbuncle on a buttock that swells to several times the size of its host body. And this Hemel Hempstead is a pretty dreary-looking place.  I remember the NF selling pamphlets on the streets there, back in the early '80s, when they were toying with Northern Ireland as a wedge issue.  Hemel is one railway stop along from my hometown Berkhamsted  (in the old days, Hemel was so small, it didn't even have a railway station - the stop was Boxmoor). Or you could make a not overly taxing bike ride to get there. Mostly I'd be going there for want of somewhere to go, in those boredom-aching days of youth that gaped with emptiness to fill. The town's attractions were limited to a larger, slightly more widely stocked W.H. Smiths than the one in Berko; a large indoor swimming pool; and... that's about it. Like Watford, it could also serve as a stage for pranks devised by me and my brothers. 

While looking up Quatermass and Hemel Hempstead, I stumbled on this eerie phonetic coincidence: there's are two streets in Hemel called Quartermass  - Quartermass Road and Quartermass Close - and they are named after the victim of a grisly 1896 murder: 12-year-old Katharine Mabel Quartermass.

Here's the full story at Hemel Today. 

Old Hemel

Just out of view, on the right side of this photo, is a little side road called Cherry Bounce - a term for a street that I have never seen anywhere else. 

In this next pic, to the left and out of sight - behind the camera - is one of the best Indian restaurants in the country. the Cochin. Worth a detour. 

Scenes from the Ricky Gervais comedy After Life were filmed right by the Old Town Hall (now a theatre, I believe) and other places in the environs, giving Hemel Hempstead another fictional alter-ego, Tambury. 

The things you find on the internet!

https://implausablealternatehistory.fandom.com/wiki/Hemel_Hempstead_(1962:_The_Apocalypse)