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Have you ever considered a teaching job in Hertfordshire? Hertfordshire may not be a London borough, but with its close geographical and historical connections with the capital, it tends to feel like one, for all its rural scenery and Home County status. Abutting outer London boroughs Enfield and Barnet, Hertfordshire funnels workers into London daily via the arterial M1, M11, M25, A1, A41 and A10 as well as a host of national and local rail connections. And just to make city types feel even more at home, the county even boasts 5 tube stations – all on the Metropolitan Line.
There’s no denying that Hertfordshire’s a pleasant place to live and work, the county’s only city, St. Albans, and towns such as Hertford, Watford, Hitchin and ‘Garden Cities’ Letchworth and Welwyn offering all the benefits of countryside and suburban life combined with the ‘Big Smoke’ little more than half an hour away by car or train. In fact, in November 2013, the uSwitch Quality of Life Index listed Hertfordshire as the third-best place to live in the UK, which is not bad going – although the downside is that the county’s house prices are eye-watering to say the least, with the average price for a property in March 2021 at almost half a million pounds!
Providing settings for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End and George Orwell’s Animal Farm among countless others, Hertfordshire has a long history of literary inspiration – in fact it Edward Bulwer Lytton of famous stately home Knebworth House who wrote the oft-quoted adage, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’. And Hertfordshire’s historical fact is as fascinating as its fictional associations. Sometime around the 10th century, King Alfred the Great established the River Lea as the border between his Anglo-Saxon realm and ‘Danelaw’, ruled by the Viking invaders, and in 1563 the Norman castle in the county town of Hertford was the temporary seat of an evacuated Parliament during a plague outbreak in London.
On the education side, there’s also a lot to be said for working here. Hertfordshire comes third in the country for schools with the best Ofsted reports and a pretty impressive selection of educational settings, including 73 comprehensive state secondary schools (including seven partially selective ones) and some 36 independent schools. There are also four multi-campus tertiary colleges and Hatfield’s University of Hertfordshire with more than 23,000 students.
From the 26-mile-long, 10,000 acres Lee Valley Regional Park following the River Lea into London and including the Lee Valley White Water Centre to historic estates such as Hatfield House and Knebworth House, both of which stage major pop and classical music concerts to Leavesden Film Studios, home of the Making of Harry Potter studio tour the county is home to far too many leisure and entertainment venues to list – and of course the larger towns and the city of St Albans offer a rich and diverse cultural life of their own.