St Albans Audio Tour: Historic Pubs & Sights

On your left is a long buff-brick frontage with round-headed windows, pale stone trim, and a central plaque set high above the shopfronts.

This building looks tidy now, but it came out of a very untidy argument. St Albans had an old open-sided market hall in the middle of the square, dating back to around fifteen ninety-six, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was falling to pieces. So the town chose this spot on the east side of the Market Place, near the medieval Wheat Cheping - that simply means the old wheat market - and launched a design competition. James Murray won in eighteen fifty-four, Joseph Briggs built it in buff brick and stone, and Mayor John Lewis opened it on the twenty-third of September, eighteen fifty-seven. The cost was one thousand three hundred and eighty pounds - a serious sum at the time.

Look up toward the top and you can still catch the spirit of John Lewis’s grand announcement: this was meant to bring order and dignity to trade. Murray gave it an Italianate face - the kind of style borrowed from Renaissance town palaces - with sturdy classical details and a proud central plaque. If you glance at the older image on your screen, you can see how neatly it slots into the historic marketplace beside the Clock Tower.

But here’s the local wrinkle: this place never behaved like a building with just one job. It hosted concerts, exhibitions, dinners, balls, and dances. In May of eighteen fifty-eight, people celebrated the railway’s arrival with a ball that ran until three in the morning... which went down about as well with the neighbors as you’d expect. Complaints followed, and the town ordered that dancing must stop at midnight.

Then came the real showdown. In eighteen fifty-nine, council officials tried to cut the Corn Exchange opening hours. The merchants responded with all the delicacy of a battering ram: they forced their way in and pushed police aside. Right here in public view, trade and town government squared up in the street, not behind a desk.

That fight kept going. After a boycott and a public meeting, the council gave way, and trading resumed in February eighteen sixty-one. The building kept serving every cause going: Baptist services, temperance meetings against drink, school examinations in reading, arithmetic, mental calculation, and singing, and in eighteen seventy-three a meeting of agricultural workers demanding wider voting rights. By eighteen eighty-eight, the keeper, Mr Richardson, said only sixteen corn stall-holders remained, and the hall earned more from public meetings than grain.

After that came shops, wartime use by the Belgian Refugee Committee and a National Kitchen, a clumsy retail conversion in nineteen twenty-four, then a careful restoration in the mid-nineteen-nineties. The restored frontage in the app image is a good guide to what was recovered. And during repainting in twenty seventeen, old lettering appeared by the door: “W Sparrow, Patentee, Harpenden.” Even now, the place likes to slip you a clue.

So this is not just a market building. It is proof that in St Albans, money often turns into spectacle, and rules only matter until someone decides to test them in public. The Old Kings Arms is about a three-minute walk from here. If you want to come back later, the shops here usually open from around nine or nine-thirty until five-thirty, and they close on Sundays.

On your left, look for a dark timber-framed frontage with an overhanging upper storey, pale infill panels, and a row of small leaded windows set into the old façade.

This is the Old Kings Arms, a fifteenth-century building, Grade Two listed by Historic England, and proof that in St Albans the arguments did not end when the medieval masons packed up their tools. They just moved into planning files. Glamorous, I know.

Local researchers kept returning to this place like detectives to a favorite case: the St Albans Society archive holds floor plans from nineteen seventy-one and nineteen ninety-six, a sketch of the timber framework from March nineteen ninety-six, and photographs up in the roof space. That tells you something important... people were not only serving drinks here, they were trying to work out exactly what still survived inside all those layers of change.

Then came the signage battles. In nineteen ninety-seven, complaints landed over unauthorised internal works; the council later regularised them through planning permission and listed-building consent, meaning legal approval for changes to a protected building. Separate complaints targeted the hanging sign. Applications were refused in nineteen ninety-eight, the old sign came down in December nineteen ninety-nine, a replacement went up in March two thousand, and by two thousand and three the council was chasing more unauthorised signage. Public authority, still arguing in the street... just with clipboards instead of pikes.

After roughly fifteen years closed, Sean Hughes and his family reopened it in twenty fifteen as Dylans at The Kings Arms, restoring its pub identity after a spell as a French restaurant. If you check the image in the app, you can see that medieval shell still doing the heavy lifting. Preservation here is not the opposite of conflict; in St Albans, saving the past usually means arguing over it first. From here, the Fleur de Lys is about a two-minute walk away, and if you plan to return, this place keeps fairly selective pub hours, with Mondays closed.

On your left, look for the red-brick front with neat sash windows and a wide arched carriageway cut through the middle.

This place plays a sly little trick. Most people clock the tidy eighteenth-century brickwork and assume that is the whole story. It is not. Museum research traces this plot back to a fourteenth-century bequest by John and Matilda Pikebon, which means the address is far older than the face it shows the street. Then, between fourteen twenty and fourteen forty, the abbot ordered an inn and brewery here, and by the early sixteen hundreds the building had settled into something close to its present form.

After the Reformation, people patched it, altered it, and nearly rebuilt it, so what stands here is layered survival... not one building, but several lives stitched together. If you check the image on your screen, you can see that later brick front still acting like a polite cover over medieval bones. By seventeen eighty-seven, a signboard already projected over the archway, marking this as one of those thresholds where trade, gossip, and arrivals all mixed.

Then comes Thomas Dimsdale. Around seventeen forty-five he bought the inn, and he was no ordinary publican. He championed smallpox variolation, an early method of protection that used a controlled infection, and in seventeen sixty-eight he went to Russia to inoculate Catherine the Great, her son Paul, and about one hundred and forty courtiers. For that, Russia paid him handsomely, granted him a pension, and made him a baron. Not bad for a man tied to a St Albans inn.

So yes, deeply local... and connected to far larger currents of knowledge, rank, and ambition. The Clock Tower is right ahead.

In front of you is a tall flint tower, square and gently narrowing in stages, edged with pale stone and crowned by battlements with little gargoyles at the corners.

For something so familiar-looking, this tower carries a surprisingly sharp edge. It went up in the early fourteen hundreds and is often called the only surviving medieval town belfry in England - a belfry being a bell tower that stands apart from a church. That matters here, because St Albans already had a powerful church setting the rhythm of local life: the abbey.

Many historians believe the town’s merchants backed this tower as a quiet act of defiance. The abbey had its own bells and its own clock, which meant it could shape the hours everyone lived by. So when Thomas Wolvey, a former Royal Mason, designed and built this free-standing tower, he may have been helping the town say, in stone, “We’ll keep our own time, thank you kindly.” And notice where it stands: face to face with the abbey, but on slightly higher ground. That is not exactly neutral placement.

Before this tower rose here, this crossroads held a different symbol of authority. King Edward the First ordered an Eleanor Cross nearby in memory of Queen Eleanor of Castile, marking one of the places where her funeral procession rested. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see the reminder of that lost monument. Royal memory stood here first; later, civic muscle moved in.

Take a moment and look upward. Each level tightens as it rises, each band of stone marks another stage, and the whole thing seems to gather itself into a public statement. Does it feel like just a town clock... or a tower built to be noticed from every direction?

It was never only decorative. Inside are bells, including the larger one called Gabriel. A fifteenth-century account later preserved by Frederick George Kitton says that an alarm here once sent townsmen rushing to arm themselves. So this tower did more than tell time; it warned, summoned, and sometimes unsettled. Gabriel even rang for curfew, until nearby residents got so tired of hearing it at night that they successfully petitioned to stop it. Even public order has its limits when it interrupts sleep.

There’s another twist. At the Corn Exchange, merchants later argued over who could trade and when. Here, much earlier, townspeople seem to have challenged something even more basic: who had the right to measure the day itself.

The tower nearly vanished in the eighteen sixties, when some councillors wanted it demolished as a nuisance and an embarrassment. Sir Gilbert Scott stepped in, argued for repair, and helped save what you see now, including the present clock mechanism from eighteen sixty-six, linked to the same Lord Grimthorpe who designed the mechanism for Big Ben.

So as you stand here, look up at the clock face, the battlements, the stubborn little gargoyles. This is not just a landmark. It is St Albans making an argument in flint, bells, and height. Even the skyline takes sides here... and The Boot is only a few steps away.

On your right, The Boot shows a dark timber-framed frontage with a sloping tiled roof and a jettied upper story that projects over the street.

This pub looks modest, but it holds a whole bundle of St Albans in one address. Parts of the building date to around fifteen hundred, and local history suggests some of it may already have stood here when the First Battle of St Albans erupted on the twenty-second of May, fourteen fifty-five. So this ordinary threshold stood close to extraordinary violence. If you check the app image, that old timbered face is right there, still keeping its place in the street line.

Its identity shifted, much like the White Lion’s. Ghost lore remembers this as the Old Wellington, and earlier still the Blue Boar. Ownership shifted too. William Draper, who owned The Boot from seventeen forty-three to seventeen sixty-two, also seems to have leased the Clock Tower and the Fleur de Lys... a neat little web of property, trade, and public life not a bad corner on the local conversation.

Then the folklore moves in. Builders reportedly found dried flowers hidden in a wall, and after that people blamed strange electrical mischief on disturbed spirits. A darker tale says a soldier took a woman upstairs, came down covered in blood the next morning, and the story says he was later transported to Van Diemen’s Land, the penal colony in Tasmania; locals said her ghost stayed behind.

By the eighteen eighties, William Austen had written The Boot into a poem of local pubs. St Albans does not lock war away in a glass case; it lets battle memory seep into pubs, poems, and ghost stories. From here, the Town Hall is about a three-minute walk. If you come back later, it is moderately priced and usually open daily from midday, with slightly earlier opening on Saturdays.

On your right is a pale stone, three-bay façade with four Ionic columns rising above three sash windows and a triangular pediment crowning the center.

From where you're standing, this place looks balanced, almost stern... which is exactly the point. St Albans wanted a building that could look like it meant business. Before this hall took over that job, the town used the old Moot Hall in the Market Place, a civic center dating from the fifteen hundreds. By the early eighteen hundreds it had grown shabby enough to spark an argument: should the new hall go in Romeland, where the justices preferred, or here on St Peter’s Street, where civic leaders wanted it?

A local architect named George Smith helped settle that quarrel. Smith came from Aldenham, trained in London offices, and earned a reputation for being careful and dependable... not flashy, but the kind of man you want when the bill matters. He rejected the idea of rebuilding on the old Moot Hall site. Repairs alone, he said, would cost five hundred to six hundred pounds, roughly fifty to sixty thousand pounds today. A full rebuild there might reach four thousand pounds, about four hundred thousand today, and even then the site would remain awkward and insecure. In plain English: too costly, badly arranged, and not worth the trouble. So Smith designed this new neoclassical hall, and the town opened it in eighteen twenty-six.

Take in that center section. The four Ionic columns - the ones with the little scroll shapes at the top - lift the eye to the pediment above, like a courthouse putting on its best Roman accent. Nothing says “behave yourselves” quite like disciplined columns.

But this was never just a pretty front. Inside, St Albans packed a surprising amount into one address: an assembly hall that doubled as a ballroom, an octagonal - that means eight-sided - courtroom lined with paneling, and cells below for prisoners waiting for trial. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see that courtroom for yourself. Civic ceremony above, detention below... a whole theory of society stacked floor by floor.

And the arguments did not stop once the stone set hard. Almost as soon as the hall opened, anti-slavery lectures filled its rooms. In eighteen thirty-one, county society held a grand ball here under the patronage of the Earl of Verulam and Lord Grimston. Then, in eighteen fifty-one, the Bribery Commission used this building to investigate Jacob Bell’s vote-buying scandal. In a borough of about seven thousand people, only four hundred eighty-three could vote, and the commissioners found that three hundred eight had taken money, typically five pounds a vote - around six hundred pounds today. That inquiry helped cost St Albans its parliamentary representation for a time. Same hall, very different choreography.

There is one more layer to remember. After the old Moot Hall disappeared, excavations at the back exposed foundations thought to be Roman, along with ancient relics. So even the “lost” civic ground had older bones under it. Like the Clock Tower’s claim that town life needed its own standing beside abbey power, this building made that case again in a new architectural language.

Later, the council moved on, the courts moved on, and in two thousand eighteen John McAslan and Partners reopened the building as the St Albans Museum. That is St Albans in a nutshell: it keeps shifting the address of public life, but it never begins from a blank page. In about one minute, we’ll head into St Albans Market, where those public negotiations spill into the open. If you want to come back inside, the museum generally opens daily from ten to four.

Look for the broad stone-paved run of Market Place and St Peter’s Street, framed by brick-and-stucco frontages and anchored by the Clock Tower at one end.

This open stretch is one of the oldest heartbeats in St Albans. More than nine centuries ago, Abbot Ulsinus set up a market here to bring money to the abbey and to give a new town its center, and that thread never really snapped. After Canterbury’s market closed in twenty twenty-two, St Albans was often described as one of England’s oldest markets, and one of the oldest street markets still trading on its original site.

That matters because this was never just a place to buy supper. It was where power showed its face in public. The abbey controlled tolls here; kings like Henry the Second and Richard the First confirmed those rights; later, the town’s mayor checked prices, weights, and measures. So this long street worked like a public stage... with vegetables at one end and authority at the other, and sometimes both in the same pair of hands.

In the medieval market, traders grouped themselves by what they sold: meat in one area, fish in another, wheat, leather, wool, even pudding. By at least the late twelve hundreds, Wednesday and Saturday had settled in as market days, a rhythm that still holds. Nearby civic buildings came and went, crosses rose and fell, pumps appeared and disappeared, but the market kept returning, like a tune this city never forgot.

And here’s the human side of it. In fifteen forty-one, a man named Raynold Carte, who held the lease for market rents, landed in the pillory here on a market day for an unstated offence. Not tucked away, not handled privately... right out in front of everyone, from an hour before opening until an hour after closing. That tells you a lot about this place. It sold bread and ale, yes, but it also handed out shame, settled arguments, and reminded people who claimed the right to run the street.

Over time, the market adapted without losing its address. Women and girls once sold straw plait by the yard near the Clock Tower, feeding the local hat trade. In the eighteen hundreds, carts, animals, grain, hay, and even the occasional portable steam engine passed through. Queen Victoria rode through on a Saturday in eighteen forty-one and noted how crowded the town felt on market day. If you want a quick visual of that long change, have a look at the before-and-after image in the app; it shows the shift from the looser market spread of nineteen sixty-six to the denser pedestrian layout of recent years.

Even the recent past fits the pattern. The market closed briefly in March twenty twenty during the pandemic, then reopened in a reduced form, with traders helping shape its survival. By twenty twenty-four, the National Association of British Market Authorities named it Best Large Outdoor Market. Not bad for a place that has spent centuries being argued over, regulated, rebuilt, and still stubbornly useful.

So here’s the question I’d leave you with: after all this time, what is this market really preserving... trade, weekly routine, civic control, or simply the habit of people coming together in public?

Whatever your answer, this is no relic. It is an old bargain still being renewed between buying, gathering, and being governed in plain sight. From here, The Cock is about a four-minute walk away. If you want to catch the market in full swing another time, it trades on Wednesdays and Saturdays from nine in the morning until half past four in the afternoon.

Look for the long, white-rendered building with dark timber framing, a sloping tiled roof, and a corner front that seems to turn and hold the street.

The Cock looks like an ordinary old pub... and that is exactly its power. Beneath this familiar frontage, the ground carries a harder memory. Local museum records suggest this site served as a field hospital during the Second Battle of St Albans, so before drinkers traded stories here, wounded men may have done the same with what strength they had left. Later, bones found in the cellar caused a flutter of excitement... only for investigators to discover they were animal bones from the kitchen, not fallen soldiers.

The house itself goes back to around sixteen hundred, and its original timber frame still shows. The first innkeeper the museum can pin down by name is George Barnes in sixteen sixty-three. That matters. With Barnes, this place steps out of rumor and into the record: a real man, keeping a real inn, at a threshold between town life and the road beyond.

If you check the image on your screen, you can see how firmly this pub commands the corner. It once shaped the map so strongly that Hatfield Road was originally called Cock Lane, and there was even a nearby Cock Pond. Not many buildings get a street to remember them.

Several brewers came and went, but the job stayed the same: serving locals and market-goers. The tour began with hidden exits and ends with a street once named for a pub, proving that in St Albans the everyday map is also a record of conflict and continuity. If you want a final stop inside, it remains a moderately priced working pub, usually open from late morning until midnight, and later on Fridays and Saturdays.