182: St Albans

OS Explorer map 182, St Albans & Hatfield Hemel Hempstead & Welwyn Garden City – I own this map, and had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 22nd May 2024.

Map area link. Google Maps location links: Tyttenhanger, St Albans, Hemel Hempstead, Whipsnade Zoo, Luton Hoo

---

As with a couple of previous posts, I came to this area on a work retreat, namely when my employer takes the team away together for a few days to discuss strategy, teambuild, let remote workers meet everyone in-person, things like that. This time around, we were in a house in Tyttenhanger, a village on the edge of St Albans in Hertfordshire.

I wasn’t organising this retreat, but I had volunteered to arrive first on the Wednesday afternoon and set things up, while my colleague running the event organised everyone else travelling from the office. I duly turned up in the rain, worked out how to get in, received the shopping order, and explored the place.

It was a very odd house. Clearly it was a real old house, with lots of odd corners, uneven bits, weathered-looking exposed beams that looked genuinely structural and so on. However, it had clearly also been filled with an eclectic selection of reclaimed fittings and furniture from very different ages and styles of old buildings. There was dark wood panelling everywhere, including all the kitchen appliances being hidden behind identical-looking wood panels. The kitchen also had some bits of stained glass, and a lot of shallow counters seemingly made of old church choir stalls and pew-ends.

One living room was in a similar dark-wood, leather and red fabric style, while the other was a blue, white and gold Baroque setup that looked like it’d been taken out of some French château. Great care had been taken to hide away anything remotely modern, including notably the toilets, which had been built in to old wooden cabinets or chairs! The grounds were also filled with slightly odd statues.

We were there for three nights, arriving on a Wednesday and leaving on the Saturday. As mentioned briefly in my previous post, I’d given notice to leave this job a few months later – as I post this, I have now left – and my successor in my role, who’d accepted his offer just a couple of weeks before and would be joining a couple of weeks later, was able to join for the first day, to let him meet the whole team and join some sessions, so that was nice!

My workplace being a research charity, the majority of the content of our retreats is about research planning, people sharing research ideas and getting feedback, things like that. With me being an administrator, a lot of this isn’t relevant to me, so I usually participate only in sessions that have more to do with the organisation itself – expansion plans, team structure, organisational culture, new programs and so on. With my successor joining only for the first day, we scheduled this kind of content for the day when he’d be present, which meant I had a nicely relaxed time for the remaining days – just doing bits of things like tidying and washing up, running a couple of social events, and having plenty of free time!

One afternoon, I led a walk for a couple of hours, planning to lead us to Colney Heath and Bowman’s Lakes, but we were defeated by the difficulty of having to cross the A414 dual-carriageway. While it wasn’t raining, it was also really wet on the ground, with giant puddles everywhere, so we got good and muddy. On the way back, I took us on a diversion to avoid one colleague having to take off his shoes to wade through a puddle for the second time, but the paths didn’t go quite where I thought, so we ended up having to push our way off-path through some, admittedly pleasant, woodland to get back to the house. We enjoyed it, though!

Another afternoon, I took a group on a trip into St Albans to look at the cathedral and some of the Roman sites. The cathedral was a novel experience in that there were a band in there really loudly practicing for their ABBA concert later that evening! It was interesting though – there were some very nice medieval wall-paintings, and a very cool medieval wooden carved loft, which a sign said was used to watch over pilgrims who were visiting the shrine of St Alban.

Unfortunately the cathedral is quite divided-up inside, with a big old screen between the nave and the crossing, and another between the choir and the shrine, which does interrupt the feeling of being in a single huge impressive space that you get in some other cathedrals; I also must admit that I much prefer an open vaulted cathedral ceiling to a flat one like at St Albans. Oh well – I suppose it is probably more representative of the medieval experience? Just a guess.

After the cathedral, we walked around Verulam Park, with its section of Roman wall and mosaic – the latter appreciated through the windows of its enclosing building, since the building was locked at the time. And afterwards we went through to the Verulamium Roman theatre, which was very cool.

And that was it, really! My final adventure was that, on my way home after the retreat, I came out of the toilets in London Paddington station, and heard a shriek of “LONG HAIR!”. I continued walking past in mild puzzlement, then two ladies jogged up to catch up with me – they told me they were on a hen party doing a bingo game, where one of the things they had to do to fill their bingo card was take a selfie with a man with long hair – I was happy to help them out!

Previous visits

I’ve been to this map area several times before. My ex-partner lived in Hemel Hempstead, just a few miles to the west of St Albans, for a time, and I went there several times to visit her, but I somehow have found no photos at all of the town itself. I’m also pretty confident that we went to to the Verulamium museum in St Albans at one point.

At the northern end of this map area, just south of Luton, is Luton Hoo, a country estate and fancy hotel, which my parents took me to for New Year’s Eve dinners at the end of 2013 and 2016, in the latter case also with my cousin Guacamole.

This map area also contains Whipsnade Zoo, which I’ve been to a few times, so I’ll leave you with some cute animals!