Ridgeway Trip XIV: To St Albans!

Warning: this post is preposterously photo-heavy.  I took so many pictures on this day....

We had a good night sleeping with the windows wide open, but by this time Kim and I were both covered with bugbites from the last few days.  I blame the Aldbury duckpond, which doesn't have a lot of ducks (mostly no ducks) but does have a lot of bugs, and is right outside the pub.  Anyway, at 9, Vivien from the St Albans office arrived to very kindly take us there.  We made a deal; she would store our luggage for a day and we would write a blog post for her about how much fun we had in St Albans, thus promoting American tourism.*  And she even offered to pick us up.  So off we went to St Albans and shoved our luggage into a storage room in her (Tudor!) office upstairs from a bakery.

The office is in the Christopher Inn building, once an inn used for pujblic events.  There is a strange sculpture of a 'succubus' in an alley corner, which apparently assured patrons that this was a 'safe' house.  How that means that I had no idea, but then I looked it up; if you can see, the succubus' ankles are chained, thus signifying safety.  

Weird 17th century succubus

The central area of a few blocks is walking only, and truly attractive, with cafes and shops and historical buildings.  There's the clock tower, which the people of the town built in the 14th century after the Wat Tyler Peasants' Revolt so they could be independent of the all-powerful abbey.  Interestingly curvy benches make a nice place to sit in front. 

New all-time favorite door, at the clock tower

We walked over to the cathedral, which is a fascinating patchwork and also extremely fancy, with nothing being the same twice.  Each window frame is different!  But we decided to leave and come back for the official tour in about 45 minutes, so we walked outside and found the old abbey gatehouse, which is enormous.  After the abbey was destroyed, it was used as a prison and eventually became part of the local school, which it still is.  We went down a street, passing the oldest pub in England, established in Anglo-Saxon times (they claim 793) -- Ye Olde Fighting Cocks.  Part of it is octagonal, and it's very attractive.  It also says that Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have stayed there for a night and kept his horse where the bar is now.

See, all the windows are different!

Outside of the nave, where the cloisters used to be

Massive gatehouse!

View from the inside

I just like these flowers

England's oldest pub?

From there we took a look at Verulamium Park, and incredibly large open space with ponds, grass, playing fields, a Roman wall, and eventually a Roman museum, but we couldn't go there yet.  We went back to the cathedral for our tour, and it was great.  We learned about the story of St Albans, a Romano-British citizen who sheltered a Christian priest, converted, and was beheaded for it.  He was England's first martyr, and a shrine developed -- and then an Anglo-Saxon church, which was then torn down by the Normans, who built the center of the cathedral in a very Norman style.  They didn't like building with the local flint, so they re-used the Roman brick from the city walls and anywhere else they could get it.  The result is an interesting hodge-podge on the outside walls; they plastered the inside walls. 

Entrance to the park

Illustration of weird brick-and-flint cathedral walls

Much of the Norman part was updated and decorated at various times; the walls of the nave still have late medieval paintings of the Crucifixion and of popular saints upon them, and the ceiling in the center has York and Lancaster insignia and portraits of kings.  They also threw out new wings every so often, for a lady chapel or to elongate the nave in a totally different style than the Norman part.  An architecture student could spend weeks studying this building!  St Albans was a very popular pilgrimage destination for centuries, and much of the church is built to corral all those people.  

Original York and Lancaster ceiling is
now covered with a cleaner replica

These wall paintings date from the 1200s (!)

Not St Albans, but St Amphibalus, a later
name for the unnamed priest Alban protected

The tomb restoration was interrupted by Covid.
Can you spot the little masked face that memorializes it?

Find the snail!

The nave, with two kinds of arches smushed together

This one is St Albans

A surprising amount of the original paint is still left

Anglo-Saxon arches incorporated into the Norman building

The saints' paintings had very interesting light projections that would slowly illuminate the painting and show what it was like when new.

St Christopher

And there's a very nice clock; as I learned from The Light Ages, St Albans had quite a lot going on in the astronomy department.  In fact the abbot was much more interested in his clock than in his nave-expanding project and apparently the king told him off and to focus, already.

Then at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the people bought the building, hid Albans' tomb, bricked up a bunch of it, and used it as their parish church for a few hundred years.  By the mid-Victorian era, it was falling to bits and a grand restoration had to be put in train.  The first guy was sympathetic to the spirit of the building, but he died and a rich lawyer took over, promising to pay for everything if he could do it his way.  So there's a lot of new Victorian building too, including an entire frontage of the church made more fancy, and a rose window put in.  At the time it was of plain glass, because the lawyer didn't like stained glass, but in the 1980s a colorful kaleidoscopic design was put in and Princess Diana dedicated in it 1989.

Center of the original rose window glass

After that we went to the old courthouse, which is now a museum/gallery/cafe.  We had lunch there -- you eat IN the courtroom -- and it was the best quiche I've had in some time.  Fabulous.  You can go and stand in the dock, sit in the judge's chair.  There is a flight of stairs into the dock from the cells below, and we went down to have a look.  There is a brick labyrinth of cells down there!  They had art symbolizing the various crimes prisoners committed (one stole hundreds of golf balls, another had road rage with his horse and cart).  

Order your food in the front...

...and eat lunch in the courtroom

Underneath, the maze of cells

Stairs up to the dock

Demonstrating the trial

Mom plays judge

There is also a gallery down at that level, which featured an exhibit of Ladybird books!  We really enjoyed looking at the development and illustration of Ladybird books, from stories for tots to educational books and fairy tales for older children.  And the gift shop was lovely.  I nabbed a postcard of a Louis Wain cat; he lived nearby in a local asylum for many years.

I would really like to own The Discontented Pony

It was also market day in town, so there were pop-ops everywhere, selling everything possible, from purses to produce.  Everyone was out and about, having fun in the sun, and women had all gotten out their flowy summer dresses.

We walked across the park, which is just beautiful, and took a look at the Roman wall.  It was quite a way to the Roman museum, but it is a fantastic museum.  Verulamium was a pretty important town, a spa place, and the museum has plenty of information about everyday life.  It also has some spectacular mosaics!  The whole thing was excavated in the 1930s.  It's very impressive.

View of the church tower from the park

Chunk of Roman wall

The museum

A watery god, apparently with lobster horns

Photo album of the excavations

As we were leaving, we saw St. Michael's Church around the corner and popped in.  You should always check a church; you never know what you're going to find.  We found a nice church that had clearly been renovated and still had old Norman arches in odd places.  Up at the altar, a statue of Sir Francis Bacon lolls in his chair!  He's buried here!!  His epitaph was great.  Then we saw part of a medieval Day of Judgement painting that had been saved, with people coming up our of their graves.  Below, the whole thing had been recreated as a textile art piece, and it was great.  Super fun.

St Michael's Church

Sir Francis Bacon hanging out by the altar

Epitaph well worth reading

Medieval painting and modern textile art:
two great tastes that go great together

Teresa's ankle had given out and we got an Uber back to the office instead of walking.  We thanked Vivien, got our luggage, and started walking to the train station, but we stopped on the way -- Kim and Teresa into a cancer charity shop with art pieces, and me and Mom into an extremely attractive bookshop.  Then we trekked to the station, getting hotter all the time, and took a train to St. Pancras.

Once in London we switched to a Piccadilly line train, and ended up in Russell Square.  Our hotel room, which was in a basement and was probably once a kitchen or scullery room, and had a window opening to a teeny-tiny area, was very squished.  But they gave us a fan, which saved our lives.  London is just not built for heat waves!!

*This is a long story, but you see, I had contacted the St Albans tourist office asking about where we could stash our luggage during the day while we explored.  My reading had taught me that I could just leave it at a railway station, but luckily I had a thought that perhaps golden age mysteries might not be completely accurate about modern conditions, so I checked and indeed, St Albans train station does not have luggage storage.  I sent an email, and they replied with 'we don't know of any place, but why not give us a call and we'll make a deal?'  So I did, and they made the nicest offer I'd ever heard!