Guest Blog

Jean Ping from California shares details of her trip to St Albans

We arrived in St Albans on a sunny summer morning and found enough there to explore for a week! It would be a lovely place to spend a few days, and is an easy trip from London on the train.

The town is centered on a medieval clock tower, which dates from a few years after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; the townspeople built it to wrest some independence from the all-powerful abbey. Around the tower we found pedestrian streets filled with an attractive mix of old and new buildings containing excellent shopping and a wide variety of cafes and restaurants. We visited on a Wednesday, which is market day, and so there were also street vendors with every kind of merchandise from local produce to crafts and clothing. So everyone was out and about, enjoying the weather and the shops. Keep an eye out for Tudor buildings, odd passages, and the 17th-century carving of a succubus with chains around her ankles!

We chose to eat lunch at the Courtroom Cafe, located in the St Albans Museum + Gallery, which was an unusual experience! The food was delicious, and we ate in the old courtroom, which is still complete with judge’s chair and dock for the prosecuted. After our meal, we were able to explore; the dock has a staircase for bringing prisoners up from the cells below, and we walked through the brick labyrinth of the old prison area. Art pieces in cells referenced the crimes former prisoners committed — my favorite was the man who stole hundreds of golf balls from the local course, but the road rage incident with a horse and cart was a close second. The museum also had a lovely exhibit on the history of Ladybird Books (Americans, imagine Little Golden Books, but for children up to age 8 or 9), which was very enjoyable for us.

The cathedral of St Albans is a particularly fascinating one, and we went on the tour. It’s a huge building, and one of the oldest in England, with roots dating back to Roman Britain. Alban was England’s first Christian martyr; he gave shelter to a fugitive priest and was beheaded for it. Eventually a shrine was built for him, it became an Anglo-Saxon church, and then the Normans built this cathedral on the spot. But the Normans didn’t like building with the local flint, so they re-used a lot of Roman brick from the ruins of Verulamium close by, and some bits of the Saxon church – which means that from the start, this cathedral has been a fascinating hodge-podge, and has only gotten more so since. Over time, new wings were built on, and the cathedral became a pilgrimage destination for thousands of people (as well as a center of astronomical knowledge). During the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid-1500s, the townspeople preserved the cathedral by buying it for their own use and bricking up St Alban’s shrine and other bits they weren’t using. The Victorians did a massive preservation and rebuilding job, with one end being completely replaced. Today you can see all of this everywhere you look, and it is so much fun! From the rare medieval wall paintings, to the mismatched columns, to the rose window dedicated by Princess Diana, there are interesting details in every corner.

After this, we walked outside and found the old abbey gatehouse, which is enormous. After the abbey was destroyed, it was used as a printing house, a prison, and eventually became part of the local school, which it still is. We went down the street, passing the oldest pub in England, established in 793 — Ye Olde Fighting Cocks. Part of it is octagonal, and it’s very attractive. A sign also says that Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have stayed there for a night and kept his horse where the bar is now.

From there we took a look at Verulamium Park, an impressively large open space with ponds, grass, playing fields, a Roman wall, and — after a walk — eventually a Roman museum. Verulamium was a fairly significant Roman town and spa, complete with the amphitheater and other amenities you would expect, and in 61 CE it was sacked and burned on Boudicca’s orders and then rebuilt. The museum is excellent, with lots of interesting information about everyday life in Roman Britain and several well-preserved mosaics.

As we were leaving the museum, we saw St Michael’s Church around the corner and popped in for a moment. (My rule is that you should always check a church; you never know what you’re going to find.) We found a nice church that had clearly been renovated and still had old Norman arches in odd places. And up by the altar, a statue of Sir Francis Bacon lolls in his chair! He’s buried here, and has an enjoyably odd epitaph. There was also part of a medieval Day of Judgement painting that had been saved, with people coming up out of their graves. Below, the entire painting had been recreated as a textile art piece. Two very nice surprises.

To end our day, we looked into various shops along the walk to the train station, including a boutique cancer charity shop and an extremely attractive bookshop Books on the Hill with both new and used titles. The train station is about ten or fifteen minutes away from the town center on foot. Our one-way tickets to St. Pancras in London were just ten pounds, which makes it an easy day trip, but if you have a few days to spend, that would be even better. There was so much that we just couldn’t fit in!

This blog was written by Jean Ping from Howling Frog Blog