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.
