North of London and south-east of the nearby St Albans, London Colney is a village and civil parish named after its proximity to the River Colne. Nestled in the heart of south Hertfordshire; London Colney is nowadays often referred to as a satellite village of St Albans. As such, the housing stock is dominated by suburban terraced housing and other quintessential suburban builds, with prices ranging from £700,000 to over £1 million!

Unlike the ancient St Albans close by, London Colney is a relatively new settlement. Although it is probably most likely it existed as an outskirts of the Roman Verulamium, it was not defined as a separate locality until much later. The first written recording of London Colney came in 1555, and the village was not made a formal civil parish until as late as 1947, after splitting with the parish of St Peter Rural.

One of the most enduring buildings in the local area is the Napsbury Hospital, designed by Rowland Plumbe in a country-house stylism and opened in 1905. It has since closed, and has been redeveloped into Napsbury Park. The hospital acted as the main mental health facility in the local area, and the initial design-plans accommodated over 1,000 patients. Of its many residents over the years included the famous artist, Louis Wain, who spent the remainder of his life in Napsbury Hospital following his diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1930. Wain is most famous for his unique art style, which almost entirely consisted of paintings and drawings of anthropomorphised cats and kittens, in a colourful and psychedelic style. Louis Wain’s life has been memorialised with the 1960 biography ‘Louis Wain: The Man who Drew Cats’ by Rodney Dale, and more recently the 2021 film directed by Will Sharpe, ‘The Electrical Life of Louis Wain’.

Much of the housing stock is priced at a significantly high point in the London Colney region; due to its proximity to London via rail and easy access to the nearby St Albans. In the St Albans City & District Council’s local development plan however, they have identified London Colney as a Tier 3 site for allocation of new housing and infrastructural developments, including the construction of new educational facilities!