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.
