This article was written by Ian Davis and first published in the Oxhey Village Environment Group newsletter in summer 2026. If you have additional information on the subjects covered in this article, please contact history@oveg.org.
We probably all appreciate living in Oxhey Village and we have some idea about what it is, and where it is, but you won’t find any maps that show ‘Oxhey Village.’ Maps of the area from the Victorian era show the place to clearly be called ‘New Bushey,’ so how did we get from one to the other?
There has been an Oxhey since Saxon times, referring to the land south-west of Watford. In 1007 AD the Saxon King Ethelred granted a parcel of land at a place called Oxengehaege to St. Albans Abbey via a document called the Oxhey Charter. Oxhey Woods and Oxhey Chapel, now surrounded by the modern South Oxhey are the remains of the ancient estate and manor house Oxhey Place (burnt down in mysterious circumstances in 1960). Bushey was, and still is a quite separate settlement on the ancient road from London, used by travellers since Roman times.
Before the coming of the railways, the area was largely agricultural with some ancient industry such as the manufacture of mortar in the form of quicklime in local chalk quarries (hence Chalk Hill) and milling took place on the river Colne (hence Hampermill). The first map from about 1800 shows the area before the industrial age with Oxhey Place and Bushey clearly shown, but at this point no railway and no New Bushey.
With the coming of the London and Birmingham railway from the 1830’s, everything changed. The huge embankment and what we now call Bushey Arches transformed the landscape and new housing began to develop around the station which opened in December 1841 (Watford Junction opened with the railway as a whole in 1837). Maps of the time show that in the next couple of decades after the coming of the railway the basic shape of Oxhey grew, notably Capel Road, Villiers Road and Grover Road with housing for workers on the railway and what was needed to support the new community. There are cottages on Villiers Road with stones proudly showing their date of build in the 1860’s.
What we do know is that for the next few decades the area was known as New Bushey and definitely not Oxhey, the extract of the map is from 1896 and clearly shows the name. The railway station itself is Bushey, as railway records show the name “Bushey and Oxhey” did not come until 1908.
There are broadly two reasons why New Bushey became Oxhey, the development of modern local government and the coming into existence of Oxhey as a separate parish of the Church of England. I won’t pretend that the history of local government reform is exciting so I will keep this bit very brief. Modern local government really came into being with the Local Government Act of December1894, when both Watford and Bushey were divided into “Urban Districts”, being the built-up areas, and “Rural Districts” being the less built-up portion. Bushey parish was therefore split with effect from 1894 into “Bushey Urban” for the part of the parish now within Watford Urban District and “Bushey Rural” for the remainder. Bushey Urban did not have its own parish council and was always governed directly by Watford Urban District Council. From this point on it became an oddity that part of Bushey – that is New Bushey was now in Watford and so the move to rename the area grew partly from this piece of legislation. The parish of “Bushey Urban” within Watford Urban District was renamed “Oxhey” on the 1st April 1906.
Bushey Rural Parish governed independently from its offices on Rudolph Road (now Bushey Museum) until its abolition in 1974 and becoming part of Hertsmere.
According to The history of Oxhey Parish, by Marjorie Bray, Oxhey as a parish of the Church of England was created in 1879, after suggestions of the need for a place of worship in the rapidly growing district of New Bushey. The creation of the new Oxhey Parish was opposed by the then-vicar of St. Mary’s Watford as it would have led to a fall in fees and emoluments for him. He was however over-ruled.
On the OVEG website there is a fascinating, and sadly uncredited, account of someone who moved to the area:
“New Bushey or Bushey New Town is a name only faintly remembered. The name now used is Oxhey, which was taken when the church of St. Matthew was dedicated in 1880. Some years ago, when I came to live near Bushey and Oxhey Station, I noticed that the older people in the neighbourhood often spoke of ”Going up to Old Bushey”, indicating that they were going up the hill to Bushey Village. Upon my inquiring about this, they would tell me that where we were now living was, of course, New Bushey, or Bushey New Town, as it was called in their young days. I discovered, also, that the name Oxhey meant little to them. That, they explained, was where the Old Chapel stood, a mile or more away, across the fields, close beside the Big House (Oxhey Place), where the Squire used to live.”
So how did we get from Oxhey to Oxhey Village? The sad news for anyone not aware is that it was probably the invention of local estate agents, as many urban/suburban villages are, and that OVEG itself played a large part in identifying the area as ‘Oxhey Village.’ It is difficult to put a precise date on this but we know that Oxhey Village Environment Group was established in 1974 with Bunny Hensby as the founder chairman (her words). In Bunny’s own history page, she describes her part in forming the Old Oxhey Environment Group in 1974 which became OVEG after its first public meeting on February 28th 1975 as far as records and memories can tell, because Oxhey Village sounded more appealing. Bunny Hensby moved to Oxhey from London with much experience of campaigning on social issues and it’s possible that she would have had an ear for a catchy phrase.
In writing this piece this is the first time that I have heard the phrase “Old Oxhey”, which I can only assume was used to distinguish the area from the post-war social housing estate of South Oxhey which was also known as “New Oxhey”.
So what do we know about the estate agents who came up with or encouraged the title of ‘Oxhey Village?’ From 50 years away it’s hard to be sure, but one candidate is the long-closed Home Seekers whose offices were variously on Villiers Road and Capel Road. Speaking to life-long Oxhey residents I have heard the name Harvey Jaquest an estate agent, dedicated athletics coach and long-time member of Watford Harriers athletics club who died in 2013. Another estate agent credited in both the OVEG and the Bushey Memories & History Facebook page is David Webb, but again we can’t be certain. If anyone reading this piece has any information on the invention of “Oxhey Village” then please do get in touch.
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