St. Albans

St Albans was the first major town on the old Roman road of Watling Street for travelers heading north, and it became the Roman city of Verulamium. It is a historic market town and is now a dormitory town within the London commuter belt and the Greater London Built-up Area.

The medieval town grew on the hill to the east of Węclingacaester where the Benedictine Abbey of St Albans was founded by Ulsinus in 793.[14] There is some evidence that the original site was higher up the hill than the present building, which was begun in 1077. St Albans Abbey was the principal abbey medieval in England. The scribe Matthew Paris lived there and the first draft of Magna Carta was drawn up there. It became a parish church after the dissolution of the Benedictine abbey in 1539 and was made a cathedral in 1877.

St Albans School was founded in AD 948. Matthew Paris was educated there and it is the only school in the English-speaking world to have educated a Pope (Adrian IV). Now a public school, it has, since 1871, occupied a site to the west of the Abbey and includes the 14th-century Abbey Gateway. One of its buildings was a hat factory, a link with the city's industrial past.