St Albans Audio Tour: Historic Pubs & Landmarks

On your left, the Corn Exchange stretches in buff brick with a long, symmetrical frontage, round-headed windows, and a central stone plaque set beneath a small curved pediment.

This handsome building arrived here in the eighteen fifties to replace a much older, open-sided market hall that had stood near the Clock Tower since about fifteen ninety-six. By then, the old structure had become shabby and tired, and St Albans merchants wanted something worthy of the town’s trading life. Council officials chose this site beside the ancient market heart, close to the medieval Wheat Cheping, the old grain-selling area.

The design came through a competition in eighteen fifty-four, and James Murray won it. He gave St Albans an Italianate building, meaning it borrowed the poised, formal look of Italian city palaces, with touches of Romanesque style in those sturdy rounded arches. Joseph Briggs built it in buff brick with stone dressings for one thousand three hundred and eighty pounds, roughly one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in today’s money, and Mayor John Lewis opened it on the twenty-third of September, eighteen fifty-seven. In the image, the restored frontage still carries itself with quiet pride. And yet it never belonged only to grain. In its early years, this place rang with concerts, exhibitions, dinners, balls and dances. In May of eighteen fifty-eight, people celebrated the coming of the railway with a ball that swirled on until three in the morning. Neighbours objected, and officials stepped in: no more dancing after midnight.

The merchants, however, were not a meek breed. In eighteen fifty-nine, when the council tried to limit the opening hours, the traders simply forced their way inside and brushed police officers aside. The quarrel dragged on into a boycott, and only when the council agreed to pay did trading resume in February of eighteen sixty-one.

If you look at the older market view on your phone, you can sense how closely this building belonged to the civic life of the square, not just to commerce. Baptist services met here. Temperance campaigners gathered here. One protest meeting even helped persuade the city to remove telegraph poles from St Peter’s Street. School examinations took place here as well, with children tested not only in reading and arithmetic, but in mental calculation and singing.

Trade faded in the late nineteenth century, and the building found new lives: a shop, a First World War meeting place for the Belgian Refugee Committee, a National Kitchen, even a rest room for wives visiting soldier husbands. A crude retail conversion in the nineteen twenties damaged the façade badly, but the restoration in the nineteen nineties rescued its dignity. Later, a repainting unexpectedly revealed ghost lettering: “W Sparrow, Patentee, Harpenden” - one more secret the building had kept.

If you want to pop back, the shops here are generally open Monday to Friday from nine until five-thirty, Saturday from half past nine until five-thirty, and closed on Sunday.

The Corn Exchange has spent its life adapting, but it has never quite given up its sense of ceremony. When you are ready, continue on and let the market square yield its next story.

On your left, look for a dark timber-framed frontage with pale infill panels and an upper storey that projects slightly over George Street.

This is the Old Kings Arms, a fifteenth-century building that has inspired a quite remarkable amount of attention. It is Grade Two listed, meaning the law protects its special historic character, and local researchers treated it almost like a patient under careful observation. The St Albans Society kept floor plans from nineteen seventy-one and nineteen ninety-six, along with a sketch of the timber framework and photographs taken up in the roof space, all to record what still survived inside the medieval structure. If you glance at the picture in the app, you can see that strong lattice of timber for yourself. Its later life turned rather contentious. In nineteen ninety-seven, a complaint accused the owners of carrying out internal works without permission, so the council stepped in, approved the necessary changes to a protected building, and later required corrective work. Then the hanging sign started its own dispute: complaints arrived in nineteen ninety-seven, official applications failed in nineteen ninety-eight, the old sign came down in December nineteen ninety-nine, and a replacement went up in March two thousand. Even in two thousand and three, more unauthorised signage had to be removed.

Then came a long hush. After closing in the late nineteen nineties, and even serving for a time as a French restaurant, the building stayed out of pub use for roughly fifteen years. In twenty fifteen, Sean Hughes and his family brought it back as Dylans at The Kings Arms, later winning national praise as a gastro pub, a pub valued as much for food as for drink.

If you plan to return, it is moderately priced, closed on Mondays, and otherwise opens from lunchtime or early evening into the night. This house endured because people kept fighting over what it should be, until someone chose to cherish it. When you are ready, carry on to the next stop.

On your left is a modest red-brick frontage with tidy sash windows and a broad carriage arch through the middle, an eighteenth-century face concealing a far older inn.

The Fleur de Lys has always kept a little of itself in reserve. Long before this brick front appeared, John and Matilda Pikebon left a house on this site in the fourteenth century. Then, between fourteen twenty and fourteen forty, the abbot ordered an inn and brewery here, and by the early sixteenth century the building had settled into much of the shape it still holds.

It did not stay still. After the Reformation, owners repaired it, altered it, and very nearly rebuilt it, so what stands before you is a careful layering of centuries. The image shows that pleasing deception: a later frontage with a medieval survivor tucked behind it.

Then comes the deliciously unexpected turn. Around seventeen forty-five, Thomas Dimsdale bought this inn. He became one of the great champions of variolation, an early smallpox treatment that gave a patient a controlled infection to guard against a worse one later. In seventeen sixty-eight, Catherine the Great summoned him to Russia to treat her, her son Grand Duke Paul, and about one hundred and forty courtiers. She paid him richly, granted him a pension, and even made him a Russian baron.

In the nineteenth century, a coach left from here for London each day, and when the neighbouring Great Red Lion came down in eighteen ninety-six, workers uncovered a fragment of cusped, or scalloped, medieval window carving from this very building.

The Fleur de Lys wears its centuries with quiet confidence. When you are ready, continue on to the next stop.

Look for the tall flint-clad tower with pale stone corners, a square clock face set high on its face, and a battlemented crown edged with little gargoyles.

This, wonderfully enough, is not just a clock tower. It is a statement. The people of St Albans raised it around fourteen oh three to fourteen oh five, and many historians believe they did so to challenge the power of the abbey. Until then, the abbey’s bells and clock helped decide the town’s rhythm. Merchants wanted something different: civic time, not monastic time. So Thomas Wolvey, a former royal mason, built this tower almost face to face with the abbey, and on slightly higher ground too. You can feel the nerve of it even now.

It is thought to be the only surviving medieval town belfry in England, which makes it rather rare company. Notice how each storey narrows a little as it rises, marked by stone bands on the outside. The flint facing gives it that dark, speckled skin, while the freestone corners keep the whole thing crisp and upright. At the top, the battlements and gargoyles lend just enough menace to remind you that medieval towns liked their beauty with a warning in it.

The site carries older memories as well. Very near here stood the St Albans Eleanor Cross, one of the great memorial crosses King Edward the First ordered after Queen Eleanor’s funeral journey. If you glance at your screen, you can see the plaque that marks that lost monument and hints at the layers of memory beneath your feet. Civil war soldiers destroyed the upper part of the cross, later generations cleared the rest away, and the spot went on to hold a market cross, a town pump, and even a drinking fountain. This little patch of street has reinvented itself again and again.

The tower itself kept finding new work. Its bells regulated trade, warned of danger, and marked daily life. The larger bell, Gabriel, rang for the Angelus at about four in the morning and again for curfew in the evening. During the First Battle of St Albans, a fifteenth-century account says the enemy reached the Market Place before townspeople realised; then the alarm bell rang, and men rushed to arm themselves. So this tower did not merely witness history. It called the town into it.

Later, during the Napoleonic Wars, officials turned the roof into a semaphore station - a shutter telegraph, in effect a visual signalling system. Messages could pass along the London to Great Yarmouth line in around five minutes, which must have felt almost magical. If you look at the historic street view in the app, you can see how perfectly placed the tower was to dominate the old market centre.

It nearly vanished in the eighteen sixties. After the living quarters at its base were destroyed, the building fell into neglect, and some councillors wanted it demolished. Sir Gilbert Scott argued for rescue instead. He estimated the repairs at seven hundred pounds, roughly the sort of sum that would be around ninety thousand pounds today, though the work finally cost one thousand pounds, well over one hundred thousand in modern terms. The restoration gave the tower its present clock mechanism in eighteen sixty-six, designed by Lord Grimthorpe, the same man associated with the mechanism of the great Westminster clock.

For all its height, this tower is really a declaration of independence in stone.

When you are ready, continue to the next stop and let the High Street share another of its old confidences.

On your right, look for a low timber-framed frontage with a sloping tiled roof and an overhanging upper storey, the whole place reading as two very old buildings quietly joined together.

The Boot carries itself like a pub with a long memory. Part of it may already have stood here on the twenty-second of May, fourteen fifty-five, when the First Battle of St Albans broke across these streets. That link matters enough that the Battlefields Trust treated it as a battlefield pub and presented landlord Will Hays with an interpretation panel in twenty thirteen. If you glance at the image on your phone, you can see that ancient frontage for yourself.

It has changed names as well as owners. Ghost lore remembers it as the Old Wellington, and earlier still the Blue Boar. In the mid eighteenth century, William Draper owned it and also seems to have leased both the Clock Tower and the Fleur de Lys, which gives this corner of St Albans a rather deliciously tangled family history.

Then the stories turn darker. Builders once found dried flowers hidden behind a wall; after that, people blamed strange electrical antics on whatever they had disturbed. Another tale tells of a soldier who spent the night upstairs with a woman, came down covered in blood, and left for Van Diemen’s Land, while her ghost stayed behind.

And yet The Boot endures: praised in the Good Beer Guide, named Best Pub in St Albans in twenty fifteen, and steered for two decades by Sean and Will Hughes. It is moderately priced and generally opens from noon, with slightly longer hours at the weekend.

The Boot feels like St Albans in miniature: battle, gossip, appetite, and a whisper of the uncanny. When you are ready, continue on toward the Town Hall.

On your right, look for the pale stone frontage with its crisp three-part symmetry, a porch of four Ionic columns, and a triangular pediment set high above the centre.

From where you stand, St Albans Town Hall has the poise of a building that expects to be obeyed. It opened in eighteen twenty-six, when the town decided its old Moot Hall in the Market Place had become too shabby and too awkward to rescue. The architect, George Smith, a local man from Aldenham who trained in London before returning home, argued firmly against rebuilding on the old site. He reckoned repairs alone would cost five hundred to six hundred pounds, around fifty to sixty thousand pounds today, and a full rebuild about four thousand pounds, roughly four hundred thousand now. Worse, he thought the old position was poor for security. His report helped settle a lively civic quarrel, and St Peter’s Street won.

Smith gave the town a neoclassical design, which means it borrows the calm order of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. You can read that in the strict symmetry, the four-column portico, and the Ionic capitals, those neat curled tops on the columns. Historians later called Smith meticulous and dependable, and many consider this one of his finest surviving works.

Yet the building’s life was never only dignified. Almost at once, it opened its doors to anti-slavery lectures, so reform entered here alongside law and government. Then, in eighteen thirty-one, the town hall turned grand host for the first county ball. The Morning Post admired the occasion, noting the patronage of the Earl of Verulam and Lord Grimston, dancing that began at eleven, Weippert’s band, and a supper judged first-rate. Justice downstairs, elegance upstairs: that contrast suits this place rather well.

And then came scandal. In eighteen fifty-one, the Bribery Commission sat here to investigate Jacob Bell’s election campaign. The findings were astonishing. Bell’s side had spent about two thousand five hundred pounds, something like a quarter of a million pounds today, and voters were commonly paid five pounds each, around five hundred pounds in modern terms. Out of only four hundred and eighty-three eligible voters in a town of about seven thousand people, the commissioners found that three hundred and eight had taken money. The result was brutal: St Albans lost its parliamentary representation for a time. If you glance at the courtroom image on your screen, you can see the octagonal room, eight-sided, wood-panelled, and intimate enough to make every accusation land with force. This was also a working courthouse in the old sense, with quarter sessions, local criminal courts that met four times a year, and even cells below for prisoners awaiting trial. Civic ceremony and detention sat almost on top of each other here. Later, the council reshaped parts of the building again, including turning the Grand Jury room into a council chamber in eighteen ninety-nine, before civic government moved elsewhere in the twentieth century and the courts finally left for Bricket Road in nineteen ninety-two.

Its newest reinvention is the gentlest of all. After a major conversion by John McAslan and Partners, costing seven point seven five million pounds, the building reopened in twenty eighteen as the St Albans Museum and Gallery. If you fancy it, have a look at the before-and-after image in the app; it shows beautifully how a courthouse learned to present itself as a museum. If you want to go inside, the museum is open every day from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon.

For all its classical calm, this building has held reform, vanity, punishment and public pride in one remarkably composed shell.

When you are ready, continue on toward the market, where the town’s civic story turns back into trade.

On your left, look for the broad paved sweep of Market Place and Saint Peter’s Street: a long, gently rising strip of open roadway whose widened shape still marks the market’s ancient ground.

This is not simply where a market happens. This is the market: England’s oldest street market, and the oldest in the country still trading on its original site. After Canterbury’s market closed in twenty twenty-two, only York outranked Saint Albans by age, and in twenty twenty-four this one claimed a fresh title of its own, Best Large Outdoor Market from the National Association of British Market Authorities.

Its story begins with Wulsin, the sixth abbot of Saint Albans. He founded the market to bring money into the abbey and, just as importantly, to pull a new town into being beside the Waxhouse Gate. So commerce and urban planning began here together. By at least the late twelve hundreds, the trading days had settled into Wednesday and Saturday, the same rhythm the market still keeps.

Medieval markets liked order, even when people did not. Traders clustered by goods: meat in the Fleshambles, fish in the Fish Shambles, wheat in Wheat Cheping, leather in Leather Shambles, wool in its own section. “Shambles” simply meant rows or benches for selling. Kings protected the abbey’s rights here too. Henry the Second confirmed control of the town and market, and Richard the First did the same.

Yet this place never dealt only in buying and selling. It dealt in rules. The abbot’s court sat nearby, and the market even had a court of piepowders, a fast court for disputes among travelling traders; the name comes from “dusty feet”. Justice could be swift, and public. In fifteen forty-one, a man named Raynold Carte stood in the pillory here from an hour before the market opened until an hour after it closed. The square was a stage for shame as much as trade. Astonishingly, punishments lingered on so long that in eighteen twelve the last pillory use in Hertfordshire took place on a market day in Saint Albans.

If you glance at your screen, the old photograph in image one shows how naturally the market stretches along the street, as though the town grew around it because, in truth, it did. That feeling lasted well into later centuries. Women and girls once sold straw plait by the yard beside the Clock Tower, feeding a local hat-making trade. In the year from June eighteen oh eight, local tollgates counted more than forty-five thousand carts and carriages and about two hundred and sixty thousand animals heading for market. By eighteen ninety-three, one newspaper still described the place with oil lamps blazing and vendors crying out so fiercely that the scene felt more medieval than Victorian.

Even politics claimed a pitch here. In nineteen eleven, women’s suffrage campaigners chalked meeting notices onto the pavement and sold copies of The Vote on market day. Then came the long modern shifts: cattle moved away in nineteen twenty-six, the live-animal trade finally ended in nineteen seventy-six, and the pandemic closure in twenty twenty forced the market to reinvent itself yet again. It recovered, modernised its layout, and returned with surprising strength.

The charter market still trades here on Wednesdays and Saturdays, from nine o’clock until half past four.

For all its changes, this long street remains Saint Albans speaking in its own plain, persuasive voice.

When you are ready, continue on to The Cock.

On your right stands a low, white-plastered corner house with exposed dark timber framing, a sloping tiled roof, and the projecting Cock inn sign.

The Cock keeps its secrets with rather good manners. Before any pub stood here, local museum records say this ground served as a field hospital during the Second Battle of St Albans. Centuries later, workers found bones in the cellar and briefly imagined they had uncovered battle casualties. The truth proved less dramatic, though no less human: they were animal bones, discarded from the kitchen.

The house itself reaches back to around sixteen hundred, and its original timber frame still shows through the later skin of the building. The image on your screen shows how stubbornly the old shape has held on at this street corner. The first innkeeper we can name with confidence is George Barnes, recorded here in sixteen sixty-three. That single name pins the place down beautifully, turning guesswork into documented life.

It mattered enough to lend its name to the neighbourhood. Hatfield Road began as Cock Lane, and there was even a nearby Cock pond on the green. This was never merely a roadside tavern. It served people at the northern edge of town and traders coming in for market day, which helps explain its long reputation. Later brewers came and went, but the house kept doing what it does now: welcoming people in. Another image shows that continuity rather nicely. Today, the Campaign for Real Ale notes two bars, a restaurant, a heated courtyard garden, and cask ales.

If you fancy ending here, it keeps moderate prices and usually opens from eleven in the morning until midnight, with later closing on Fridays and Saturdays.