St Albans

• 1. Introduction

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  St Albans sits 20 miles north-west of London, a city whose streets have been walked for more than two thousand years. Before Roman roads, before cathedral spires, before the Wars of the Roses, people chose this particular patch of Hertfordshire ground and kept choosing it, generation after generation. The city takes its name from a man who died rather than hand over a fugitive priest. His hillside grave became a place of pilgrimage, his story was told by the Venerable Bede, and a great abbey rose where his body was believed to lie. That abbey would go on to host the first draft of Magna Carta. One of its schoolboys would grow up to become the only English pope. Its market, founded by an abbot, still opens on Wednesdays and Saturdays today. The questions worth asking about St Albans are not just what happened here, but why the same piece of ground kept attracting consequence.

• 2. Alban and His Legend

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  Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People carries the most elaborate version of Alban's story. He lived in Verulamium, the Roman city that preceded St Albans, at some point during the 3rd or 4th century, when Christians faced active persecution. A priest arrived at his door, fleeing from his pursuers, and Alban sheltered the man in his house. Spending time with the priest, he became so struck by his piety that he converted to Christianity himself. When soldiers came searching, Alban put on the priest's cloak and presented himself in the man's place. He was arrested and told he could avoid punishment by renouncing his new faith. He refused. He was taken out and executed. Later legends added stranger details: his head rolled downhill after the execution and a spring of water welled up at the spot where it came to rest. His grave on the hillside outside the city walls attracted pilgrims, and in 429 Germanus of Auxerre visited the site. Germanus then promoted the cult of Alban more widely. Recent investigation at the site has uncovered a basilica, pointing to what researchers describe as the oldest continuous site of Christian worship in Great Britain.

• 3. Verulamium

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  Before any saint gave the city its name, the ground was already inhabited. An Iron Age settlement called Verlamion occupied Prae Hill, about 2 kilometres west of where modern St Albans stands, now covered by the village of St Michael's, Verulamium Park and the Gorhambury Estate. The name is Celtic, meaning "settlement over or by the marsh". Excavations in 1996 produced silver coins from the Roman Republic era dating from around 90/80 BC, suggesting trade with Rome and an established settlement on the site about fifty years before Julius Caesar attempted to invade Britain. Tasciovanus, whose power centred here, moved the tribal capital to the site around 25 to 5 BC. The defensive earthwork known as Beech Bottom Dyke may have been built by Cunobelinus, though its full significance remains uncertain. When the Romans arrived, the settlement grew into Verulamium, granted the rank of municipium around AD 50, making it the second-largest town in Roman Britain after Londinium. That status brought Roman infrastructure: a forum, a basilica, a theatre. It also brought the attention of Boudica of the Iceni, who sacked and burned the city in 61 AD. A black ash layer found during excavations in 1996-97 was dated to 60-65 AD, confirming the ancient written record. Two fires damaged the civic buildings further, one in 155 and another around 250. The theatre fell out of use by the end of the 4th century, and Roman occupation of the city ended between 400 and 450 AD. A hypocaust, still in situ under a mosaic floor, and portions of the city walls remain visible today.

• 4. The Abbey and Medieval Life

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  The Benedictine Abbey of St Albans was founded by Ulsinus in 793 on the hill east of the old Roman site, where it was believed St Alban was buried. An archaeological excavation directed by Martin Biddle in 1978 failed to find Roman remains at the site of the medieval chapter house, leaving the precise relationship between early Christianity and the Roman city still open. The present abbey building was begun in 1077 and became the principal medieval abbey in England. The scribe Matthew Vickers lived and worked there. The first draft of Magna Carta was drawn up within its walls. Matthew Paris, one of the most significant chroniclers of the medieval period, was educated at St Albans School, which was founded in AD 948. Until 2025 that school was the only institution in the English-speaking world to have educated a pope: Adrian IV. Between 1403 and 1412, Thomas Wolvey was engaged to build a clock tower in the Market Place. It remains the only extant medieval town belfry in England. Its original bell, named Gabriel for the Archangel, weighs one ton and sounds F-natural. Gabriel rang at 4 am for the Angelus and at 8 or 9 pm for the curfew. The ground floor of the tower was a shop until the 20th century, with the upper levels designed as living quarters reached by 93 narrow steps. The street market founded by Abbot Ulsinus still operates on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Its formal legal standing was established in 1553 when Edward VI sold the right to hold it via letters patent, which also incorporated St Albans as a borough with a mayor.

• 5. Wars, Roses, and Gunfire

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  Two battles of the Wars of the Roses took place in or near St Albans, bringing armed conflict directly into the streets and fields the townspeople knew. The First Battle of St Albans was fought on the 22nd of May 1455 within the town itself. The Second Battle of St Albans followed on the 17th of February 1461, just to the north of the settlement. St Albans had long been the first major stopping point on Watling Street for travellers heading north out of London, a strategic position that made it both prosperous and exposed. Its numerous old inns reflected that coaching-town role. That same road had been the spine of Roman Britain, and the medieval town's fortunes were built on the traffic it generated. The dissolution of St Albans Abbey in 1539 ended centuries of ecclesiastical control over the town, passing the abbey's rights to the crown. The building that had been the centre of English Benedictine life became a parish church. It would not regain major status until 1877, when Queen Victoria issued a royal charter granting city status to the borough and cathedral status to the former abbey church in response to a public petition.

• 6. Film Sets and Famous Names

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  St Albans has served as a backdrop for an unusually wide range of productions, drawn by the mixture of medieval architecture, Victorian streets and proximity to London. The Abbey and Fishpool Street provided the setting for the pilot episode of the 1960s television comedy All Gas and Gaiters. The area around Romeland, directly north of the Abbey Gateway, appeared as part of an Oxford college in episodes of Inspector Morse, with several local pubs also featuring. Fishpool Street stood in for Hastings in some episodes of Foyle's War. Sean Connery's 1995 film First Knight used the Lady Chapel of the Abbey, while the nave stood in as a substitute for Westminster Abbey in Johnny English starring Rowan Atkinson. A 19th-century gatehouse near the mainline station appeared in the title sequence of Porridge, starring Ronnie Barker. The 2001 film Birthday Girl, starring Ben Chaplin and Nicole Kidman, was partly filmed in the city. In 2018, a Gucci advert featuring Harry Styles was filmed at a fish and chip shop in the Fleetville neighbourhood. In early 2022, Verulamium Park was used as a filming location for Wonka starring Timothee Chalamet. The city has also produced its own musicians: bands including Enter Shikari, Friendly Fires and The Zombies all came from St Albans. The Odyssey Cinema on London Road, originally opened in 1931, stands on the site of the Alpha Picture House, Hertfordshire's first cinema, which was opened in 1908 by film-making pioneer Arthur Melbourne-Cooper.

• 7. Samuel Ryder and the Cup

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  Samuel Ryder, the founder of the Ryder Cup, lived and worked in St Albans. His packet seeds business in the 1890s operated at one point from a packing warehouse on Holywell Hill, a building that later became a Cafe Rouge before closing in 2023. His passion for golf and his financial support of the sport led directly to his donation of the now globally recognised Ryder Cup. He is buried in Hatfield Road Cemetery. In July 2012, the Olympic Torch Relay passed the cemetery to honour his memory. The Great St Albans steeplechase, once described as the most prestigious in England, also has a St Albans connection worth noting. In the 1830s it attracted the best horses and riders from Britain and Ireland, and in 1837 it was considered so important that the top competitors chose to bypass the Grand National at Aintree rather than miss it. The race was discontinued without warning in 1839 and quickly forgotten. These two sporting stories, one a race discontinued into obscurity and one a cup that became a fixture of international sport, both trace back to the same small city 20 miles from London.