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.
