Or rather…
London escaping.
Fifteen minutes.
That’s all it takes.
About the length of a kettle boil,
a couple of emails,
half an argument with the Wi-Fi. Fifteen minutes from West Hampstead and you’re in another world entirely.
And I mean another world.
Not metaphorically. Properly.
Because here’s the thing about St Albans.
It cheats.
It’s too close to London to feel this different.
Too easy to get to.
Too… improbable.
You step off the train and the air is different.
The light feels different.
Even the pace of the footsteps around you has changed.
London has been dialled down. History has been dialled up.
And then you look around and realise you’ve landed in a place that has been doing its thing
for nearly two thousand years.
Let’s drop the first jaw-dropper.
Before it was St Albans, it was Verulamium.
One of the largest towns in Roman Britain.
Not a sleepy outpost.
A proper, bustling, important place.
Streets, shops, theatres,
the works.
And then in 60 or 61 AD,
along comes Boudica and,
in a fit of entirely understandable rage,
burns the place to the ground.
Which is one way of making a point.
The Romans, to their credit, rebuild.
Bigger. Better. More Roman.
And you can still see it.
Not in some dusty museum case. Out there.
Under your feet.
In the park.
In the bones of the place.
But St Albans doesn’t stop there.
Oh no.
Because then comes Alban himself.
Britain’s first Christian martyr.
A Roman soldier who,
according to the story,
swaps clothes with a priest to help him escape persecution,
gets caught,
and pays the ultimate price.
Cue a cathedral.
Not just any cathedral.
St Albans Cathedral is a magnificent,
sprawling, slightly eccentric masterpiece.
Part Norman,
part medieval,
part “we’ll just add a bit more while we’re at it.”
It’s got the longest nave in England.
It stretches.
It soars.
It ambles, rather like a confident old lion.
And it sits there,
presiding over the city like it’s seen everything.
Which, to be fair, it has.
Now, here’s where it gets particularly London Walks.
Because St Albans isn’t just about the big hitters.
The headline acts.
The Romans.
The martyr.
The cathedral.
It’s about the texture.
The streets that twist and turn like they’ve got stories to tell.
The market that’s been running,
in one form or another,
for centuries.
The sense that every second building has a past life,
and probably a secret.
And then there are the pubs.
Oh, the pubs.
We’re talking proper,
time-honoured,
beams-and-brass,
low-ceilinged beauties.
The kind of places where you half expect a 17th-century highwayman to be in the corner,
nursing something strong and plotting something stronger.
St Albans has more than its fair share of them.
It wears its history comfortably. Pint in hand.
And here’s the kicker.
You don’t have to find all this on your own.
Because on April 1st,
we’ve got Alison.
Top-flight. Award-winning.
Blue Badge.
The real deal.
And crucially, she’s local.
She lives there.
Knows the place not just as a guide,
but as a home.
Which makes all the difference. You’re not just getting the history. You’re getting the inside track.
The little turns,
the tucked-away corners,
the things that don’t make it into the guidebooks.
That’s gold dust, that is.
Let’s talk about the journey.
From West Hampstead,
it’s about 15 minutes.
You barely have time to settle into your seat before you’re there.
Which creates one of those delicious London paradoxes.
You haven’t gone far.
But you’ve gone elsewhere.
This isn’t Greater London with a different postcode.
This is Hertfordshire.
This is countryside brushing up against history
brushing up against lived-in, everyday life.
It’s the sort of place where you look around and think,
“How have I not done this before?”
And April 1st is perfect timing.
Spring just starting to stretch its legs.
Light a bit kinder.
Air a bit softer.
The kind of day when a cathedral looks even more cathedral-y
and a pub looks even more… necessary.
There’s also something rather pleasing about doing this as a Londoner.
We’re so used to thinking the world comes to us.
That London is the centre,
the hub, the everything.
And then you take a short train ride and realise
that just beyond the edges,
there are places like St Albans quietly getting on with being extraordinary.
No fuss.
No fanfare.
Just two thousand years of history, laid out for you like a well-stocked table.
So here’s the offer.
April 1st.
A rare out-of-town London Walks outing.
Fifteen minutes from West Hampstead.
Guided by Alison,
who knows St Albans the way a good chef knows their kitchen.
Roman ruins.
Medieval marvels.
Streaks – and streets – of history.
Pub perfection.
And that lovely,
slightly smug feeling
of having discovered something that was there all along.
London calling.
But sometimes, just sometimes, London is calling you… out.
Here’s to a little excursion.
A little time travel.
A little reminder that the best journeys are sometimes the shortest ones.
———
Another London story along at this time tomorrow.
And what company we’ll be keeping – Peter Ustinov.
It doesn’t get much better than that.
See you then.