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.
