CHAPTER 10: MANCHESTER, CHELMSFORD & ST. ALBANS ALONG WITH A GAME OF MONOPOLY

"Sorry." It was the first thing that A said to me on opening his front door. It was a word I was going to hear countless times during the course of the day. We'd planned the day many weeks before when the BBC released tickets for a recording of their long running radio 4 comedy 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue'. The venue we chose was Reading and although the town doesn't have a cathedral, we'd works our a route that went via St Albans which does. A's greeting was not a reference to the show's title but a genuine apology for the day to come. He was the deputy head of a secondary school and, with a government OFSTED inspection looming , the headteacher had gone on sick leave, sadly never to return, leaving A in charge, and things didn't look good. When the inspection came a few weeks later, he and the other senior staff managed to get a positive judgement, but that morning this outcome looked unlikely and A was desperately trying to get things organised in his new role as acting head. He was not a happy man as witnessed by an apology for his depressed state of mind before the day had begun. We set off but, unlike our usual journeys together where we'd either embark on a genuine full scale argument before we'd left his village or he'd wind me up to start a contrived argument, this time he just needed to talk about the issues he was having, punctuating his narrative every few minutes with the word 'sorry'.

Despite this, I had an enjoyable, if a little frustrating day out. We arrived in St Albans around mid morning and as we drove through its medieval streets we were struck by a familiar sight. There were lots of  young people wearing gowns and mortar boards, accompanied by families in their Sunday best. We'd scored another degree ceremony day. On this occasion, drawing on the Bristol experience, I gave up all thoughts of trying to get A into the cathedral, reluctantly accepting that we'd have to make another visit some time in the future. We walked up the hill from the car park by the river, wandered around the outside of the cathedral and then found a coffee shop for a drink. We did a bit of shopping before setting off to Reading where I enjoyed watching two enjoyable and incredibly funny recordings of the show whilst A fretted and made phone calls to other members of his staff, for which, of course, he apologised: Sorry. A few months later, we returned to the city, this time with Sue and H, and whilst they scoured the shops for bargains, we made entry to the cathedral. 

Unlike Bury St Edmunds Cathedral where they didn't bury St Edmund, St Albans Abbey was the place where the Saint was interred, his shrine becoming a place of pilgrimage in medieval times. Alban is believed to have been a Roman soldier stationed in the Roman town of Verulamium, an important settlement that lay on a major Roman road, Watling Street. He encountered a Christian priest who may or may not have been called Amphibalus, and was so impressed his faith that he converted to Christianity. Amphibalus was in Britain trying to escape the persecution of the Christians ordered by the Roman emperor Diocletian. When soldiers arrived to arrest the priest, Alban swapped clothes with him, offering himself up and refusing to worship the Roman gods when put on trial. The somewhat inevitable result that he was beheaded by the river' making him Britain's first Christian martyr. Stories about him from a later period elaborate on what happened next with various miraculous events becoming associated with the Saint including the eyes of his executioner falling out of their sockets. He was buried where the cathedral stands today in a Saxon church and a town grew up around it on the hill above Verulamium. When the Normans arrived, they rebuilt the church using stones and bricks from the abandoned Roman settlement. Where the four arms of the crucifix floor plan meet, they built a massive Norman tower and this still stands today. In places its walls are seven feet thick and it weighs a colossal 5,000 tonnes and it is the only major medieval tower in the country still standing.

The story of Saint Amphibalus is altogether more complicated. None of the accounts written at the time give the name of the priest who St Alban saved and whose shrine also ended up in what was until the reformation, the Abbey of St Albans. Later historians ascribed to him his role in the story, and when the remains of his body were allegedly found, his shrine too became a place of pilgrimage. This occurred at a time when the abbey was very short of money, the new saint becoming the latest attraction which brought in pilgrims and their offerings: a very convenient arrangement and possible a fortunate coincidence.

Despite only becoming a cathedral in 1877, the building, being an ancient foundation, very much looks the part. This was not the case fifty years before when the church, having been saved from destruction in the reformation, fell into a state of disrepair. It was the town's Victorian benefactors who restored it to the state we found it in although there has been some mixed reviews of the alterations that were carried out. On entering the cathedral at the west end, the nave stretched out in front of us, its 85 metres length making it the longest in an English cathedral. Like Chelmsford, the pews in the nave had been removed and replaced with chairs. The nave was decorated with medieval paintings that would have been common in all churches prior to the reformation. They date from the 12th to the 16th century and, at a time when the vast majority of the congregation were illiterate, they provided visual depictions of bible stories and the teachings of Jesus. They were whitewashed during the reformation but rediscovered and restored in 1862.

We made out way, like countless pilgrims before us, to find the shrine of St Alban. The original shrine was placed on a pedestal of Purbeck marble which went the same way as the silver casket that contained St Albans remains. However, during restoration work, over 2,000 pieces were found and the pedestal was reconstructed. Nearby was a watching loft, built in the 15th century, where a monk would keep an eye on the pilgrims visiting the shrine. As we had discovered at Peterborough, monks from rival abbeys were not averse to helping themselves to a relic or two if they got the chance to supplement their own monastery’s collection. The watching monk had a much more pleasant time than the monks in their little kiosk, having a spacious elevated room in which to observe the goings on in the nearby chapels. The frieze on the side of the loft was made of oak and featured both scenes fromSt Alban’s life and representations of medieval life such as bear-baiting and wrestling. 

Monks living in the monastery had many different roles and responsibilities. In the early 1100s, Robert de Camera Breakspear became a lowly clerk at the abbey, his wife having given him permission to enter monastic life at a rather mature age. Whilst Robert remained in the lower orders, his son Nicholas was to go on to much greater things. Nicholas applied to join the brothers at St Albans but was turned down due to his lack of a formal education. Not disheartened by this, the young Nicholas travelled to France where he was accepted into the monastery of St Rufus near Avignon as a canon regular. He quickly rose through the ranks to become the abbot and in doing so attracted the attention of the pope Eugene III. In 1149, the pope, impressed with Nicholas' zealous approach to reform and his engaging character, made him the cardinal bishop of Albano in Italy. Nicholas was then sent on a mission to Scandinavia as the papal legate, to reorganise the church there. Five years later, he received the ultimate reward by being elected the 170th pope, the only Englishman to hold this position. His tenure was not an easy one because it came at a time when the power of the pope and the nobles surrounding him was being questioned, especially in Rome. Adrian IV, as he was now called, also had problems with the Normans in southern Italy and ended up engaging in conflict against them in alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. 

On leaving the cathedral, we were presented with a fine view of the Abbey Gateway which, like the Abbey itself, had survived the destruction of the rest of the monastery in Tudor times, possibly because it had doubled up as the town's prison. During the Peasants' Revolt, the local townspeople besieged it, eventually gaining entry and releasing some of the prisoners. They then attacked the abbey where only the abbot remained, the monks having fled. The gateway was eventually sold to St Albans School and part of it now lies within their grounds but we could still walk through its arches as visitors to the monastery would have done for many centuries. We then continued up into the city centre to meet the ladies. I would return to St Albans a third and fourth time on my quest to complete other collections, the next occasion being part of a daylong odyssey that took me from the small village of Harby in Nottinghamshire to Charing Cross station. A few years ago, I began writing articles for a local magazine. My series on 'Cathedral Journeys' was well received as was my account of one very hectic day when I collected all the sites where there were or had been Eleanor Crosses. 

The marriage of the English King Edward I to Eleanor of Castile was primarily arranged to ally England with the Spanish kingdom of Castile. An unexpected outcome was that the two were deeply in love and devoted to each other. When Edward went on his Royal progress around the country, Eleanor would accompany him and sadly, on one of these journeys, she became ill and died. Her body was taken to Lincoln where it was embalmed, her heart being sent to Blackfriars in London because she'd promised it to the Friars! Then the body was transported back to the capital to be buried in Westminster Abbey, taking several days and a less than direct route so that it could spend each night resting on royal or religious ground. Edward, wanting people to remember his queen and to pray for her soul, erected a cross at each of these resting places and it was these locations I intended to visit in a day. The site of the first cross in Lincoln now lies under some very busy dual carriageway, the cross having long disappeared. There were also no crosses in Grantham or Stamford but the cross at Geddington, a quiet village just off the main road from Corby to Kettering, still stands. It is a fine piece of medieval sculpture and contains the heraldic shields of Edward and Eleanor and several effigies of the queen. From there I drove to the south of Northampton where another original cross stands at the side of one of the town's arterial roads on the edge of Delapre Abbey. Somewhat squatter than the previous cross, it nevertheless contains similar imagery.  

The queen's body then travelled westwards to pick up the old Roman Watling Street which was still a major thoroughfare centuries after the Romans had left England. Its  next stopping place was Stoney Stratford where I searched in vain for a plaque on the Main Street identifying the point where the cross stood. Then it moved to Woburn, a delightful village that I was minded to return to, and Dunstable where I was determined never to return. Neither retained their crosses but at least Woburn allowed me to park up and have a little wander around. Dunstable was basically a slow moving traffic jam and, as I passed the Queen Eleanor Shopping Centre, I decided that was going to be as close as I'd get. It was at this stage in my day that I moved on to St Albans, parking up and mooching around the market place where there was absolutely no record of there ever having been a memorial cross as far as I could discover. My stay was not long because time was running out and I quickly moved on to Waltham Cross, named after the Eleanor Cross, adorned with an actual cross but not quite as authentic as it appeared at first sight. The medieval stone shields and effigies had been removed in recent times and dispatched to the Victoria and Albert Museum. What I stood looking at were very accurate reproductions which, if not original, very good likenesses which provided me with a more accurate idea of how the cross would have looked when it was first erected. 

The final two locations were within a short train and tube ride to central London. The cross that stood on Cheapside, near to St Paul's Cathedral, became a symbol of Catholicism during England's religious conflicts. At least one fight broke out here when Protestants tried to pull it down and a Civil War pamphleteer published an article condemning the cross, calling for the stone memorial to be prosecuted for treason. Needless to say, the case never made it to court. My final destination was Charing Cross, also named after the Eleanor Cross that once stood at the end of Whitehall. The cross that stands in the forecourt of Charing Cross Station is a fairly inaccurate version of what the cross might have looked like, placed in entirely the wrong place. The actual cross stood I'm the place the equestrian statue of Charles I  now occupies. The body made one final journey from here, the short distance to Westminster Abbey and, as I'd already been there a number of times including my visit with A, I decided to head for home to compose my article. 

Two years later, I was again outside Charing Cross Station, working on a small collection to provide me with a focus for my magazine contributions. Near to the Charles I statue are the headquarters of the Electricity Board, which was an electric company, one of the non-coloured squares on a traditional London edition game of Monopoly. My collection that day was all the Monopoly squares, beginning at light blue Euston Road because that's where my train arrived and moving on to each of the coloured locations. I d plotted a route that included a spot outside Lambeth North tube station, designated as 'Go' by the Ordnance Survey, the Tower of London which had for centuries been a 'Go to Jail'. I came across a shop selling lottery tickets, very much a game of 'Chance' whilst a community project in Whitechapel had been funded by Tower Hamlets' 'Community Chest'. The hardest coloured street to find was Vine Street, a tiny cul de sac tucked away behind Piccadilly Circus and once the location of law courts, a feature shared by the orange squares. Most difficult non-coloured square? 'Waterworks'. My visit to the Thames Water Meter Company near to the British Museum was a disappointment as the building was merely a holding address for mail. All the current waterworks were miles out of London and so I went for the site of a long night forgotten waterworks which stood next to the Water Gate, once by the Thames, now marooned in Embankment Gardens. The waterworks features in contemporary paintings including one by Canaletto, and was distinguished having a very tall tower in the shape of a thin pyramid. Indeed, in the paintings it looks like a smaller version of The Shard which is no coincidence as Renzo  Piano, the architect who  designed the Shard, was particularly inspired by the shape of the 'waterworks'.