When Gerald Gardner needed a permanent place to meet with a working coven in the early 1950s, he found one on the grounds of a naturist club near the village of Bricket Wood, in the countryside just outside St Albans, Hertfordshire. The club owned an old barn reassembled on its land as a folk-history exhibit called the witch's cottage, complete with a fireplace and a cauldron, originally built to illustrate a vanished way of country life rather than to host any actual practice. Gardner had it moved to a corner of the grounds set apart with its own fence and gate, and from around 1951 it became the meeting place of what historians now call the Bricket Wood coven, the first group through which the practice Gardner called Wica, later Wicca, operated on an ongoing basis rather than as a single initiation or a private hobby.
Doreen Valiente, a young woman who had read Gardner's earlier novel and sought him out, was initiated into the Bricket Wood coven in 1953 and rose within a few years to High Priestess, the working partnership through which most of the tradition's surviving liturgy, including the Charge of the Goddess, took the form it still circulates in today. The cottage itself no longer stands in its original form, but the coven's few years there are treated by historians of modern Paganism as the hinge between Gardner's private theorizing and Wicca as something other people could actually join, learn and, eventually, carry away and adapt on their own.