This volume completes Chafford hundred and covers Harlow hundred.
The part of Chafford hundred, now in Brentwood District and
Thur-rock borough, includes Aveley, Stifford, Grays Thurrock and
West Thurrock beside the Thames and, further north, Childerditch,
Brentwood, and South Weald. Grays Thurrock, formerly a small port
with a brickworks and a brewery, is now the main centre of the
borough. The coastal marshes west of Grays were used mainly as
sheep pastures until the 18th century, when large-scale chalk
quarrying and lime burning began. The West Thurrock cement
industry, which grew up in the 19th century, became one of the
largest in Europe. It has since declined and the area is now used
mainly for the storage of oil and petroleum and the manufacture of
soap, detergents, and marga-rine. Brentwood, now a large dormitory
suburb of London, owed its early growth to its position on the main
London-Colchester road, and per-haps also to the cult of St. Thomas
the Martyr. The mansions of Belhus, at Aveley, and Weald Hall,
South Weald, both dating from the 16th century, were demolished
after the Second World War. South Weald park remains as a country
park, and so does Thorndon park, including part of Childerditch,
but some land in Belhus park was used after 1950 for a housing
estate of the London county council. At Purfleet, in West Thurrock,
a smaller housing estate occupies the site of powder magazines
built by the government in the 1760s. Harlow hundred contained 11
parishes in west Essex, including the ancient market towns of
Hatfield Broad Oak and Harlow. Hatfield, with its Benedictine
priory, was one of the principal places in Essex in the Middle
Ages, but it de-clined after the 16th century, and the hundred
remained largely rural until after the Second World War, when five
of its parishes became the new town of Harlow, built to rehouse
80,000 Londoners. Hatfield forest, belonging to the National Trust,
comprises over 400 ha. There have been extensive maltings at
Sheering and Harlow, breweries at Harlow and Hatfield Heath, and a
silk mill at Little Hallingbury. Among great houses the
16th-century Hallingbury Place has disappeared, but Barrington Hall
and Down Hall, both rebuilt in the mid 19th century, survive. At
Netherhall, Roydon, are the remains of a 15th-century gatehouse.
General
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