St Albans

I did finally motivate myself to take a day trip yesterday. I caught a train up to St Albans, a city just outside London to the north. I've long had it on my radar as a place to visit, with its medieval cathedral and Roman ruins. Weirdly, it always makes me think of the actress Maggie Smith. When I came to London for the first time back in 2000, I saw "The Lady in the Van" on stage in the West End, and there's a line in the play in which Smith's character says of her beloved van: "I came down from St Albans in it and plan to go back there eventually. I’m just pedaling water at the moment." At the time I had no idea where St Albans was, but that always stuck in my memory.

Anyway, it's about the easiest thing in the world to catch the Thameslink train in West Hampstead and make the 20-minute journey to St Albans, where a short walk leads to the city center and the cathedral. Most of St Albans appears quite prosperous but of course my camera lens was attracted to the lonely-looking closed shop above.

I got caught in a downpour and darted into a coffee shop for a quick cup while the rain stopped. Then I made my way...

...to the cathedral. Much of the building is said to be Norman architecture of the 11th century, with Gothic additions from the Victorian era.

Here's the inside, with its ornate tiled floors and intricately carved altar. The ceiling is quite colorful, too.

These medieval oak doors (there are two of them, though my picture only shows one) used to stand at the church's main entrance. They're from the 1400s.

After exploring the cathedral, I went looking for lunch.

I did not go to this pub, which was back toward the train station and thus out of my way, but I liked the name (Robin Hood) and the sign. Instead, I went to a pub called The Peahen, where I had a yummy CBLT (a BLT with chicken added), some excellent sweet potato fries and a pint of local brew. I also learned via the sound system that Morrissey did a cover version of "Wedding Bell Blues," and it was entertaining to hear him pleading with Bill to marry him.

From there, I walked to Verulamium Park, named for the Roman city that stood at the site of modern St Albans back in AD 50 or thereabouts. It was the second-largest Roman settlement in Britain, after Londinium, and in fact Saint Alban himself was martyred by the Romans there.

Today the park contains fragments of Roman walls and an excavated Roman villa with an impressive mosaic floor:

It dates from about AD 180 and contains 220,000 tiles cut from natural stone.

I also visited the Verulamium Museum, which contains a lot of Roman artifacts such as pottery, coins and other objects of everyday life in Roman Britain, and explains something of the lives of the people who lived at this site.

And I visited the old Roman theater, which included some funny informational panels: "Welcome to the Roman town of Verulamium: Queen Boudicca gave it the thumbs down." (Boudicca, a Celtic queen, famously sacked and burned Verulamium back in the day.)

At this point, there were scary-looking storm clouds blowing in, so I high-tailed it back to the train station and caught the train back to West Hampstead, where Olga was patiently waiting, no doubt wondering where I'd gone. (Her dog walker visited while I was out so she got some entertainment, too.)