St Albans

:For other places named similarly, see St. Albans (disambiguation).

Miscellany

• The Royal Navy has used six vessels with the name HMS St Albans.
• CAMRA was founded in the Farriers Arms in Lower Dagnall Street in St Albans and still has its head office in Hatfield Road. The local branch holds an annual beer festival in St Albans. In recent years this has been a four day event starting on a Wednesday near the end of September.
• An experimental water tank was built alongside London Road, St Albans for the Vickers shipbuilding company in 1912 on a site measuring 680 by 100 feet. Three years later in 1915, the first private wind tunnel was also built here, but moved to their Weybridge works shortly after World War I. From December 1918 the test tank was used in developing fuselage profiles for amphibious aircraft, such as the Vickers Type 54 Viking, completed during 1919.
• St Albans is home for one of the country's oldest and finest indoor skateparks, at the Pioneer Youth Club, in Heathlands Drive, next to the fire station. Its ramps are available to all skateboarders and inliners. A new outside mini ramp was built in March 2005. As well as being available to skateboarders, the Pioneer Club hosts regular gigs for local bands.
• The football team is St Albans City F.C.: its stadium is on the edge of Clarence Park and they play in the Conference South. There is also the Old Albanian Rugby Club which has a large facility known as the Old Albanian sports complex or the Woolam Playing Fields, which is also the home of the Saracens A team and Zurich A League.
• The 1957 April Fool's Day spoof edition of BBC documentary series Panorama, which dealt with the fictitious Swiss spaghetti harvest, was filmed partly at the (now closed) Pasta Foods factory on London Road, St Albans.

Notable people

• Rod Argent, musician and songwriter (b. 1945). The Zombies (Argent with Colin Blunstone, Paul Atkinson, and Hugh Grundy) was formed at St Albans School.
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Philosopher and statesman
• Nicholas Breakspear (c1100-1159), later became Pope Adrian IV
• Ralph Chubb (1892-1960) Eccentric lithographer
• William Cowper (1731-1800) Poet
• Willis Hall, playwright and TV script writer lived in St Albans for many years and was for a while president of St Albans City F.C.
• Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) Theoretical physicist, educated at St Albans School
• Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), film auteur, resided in Childwickbury Manor, to the north-west of the town, from 1978 until his death
• Philip Madoc, actor, lives locally and is patron of two local organisations, The Abbey Theatre and St Albans Movie Makers
• John Mandeville (14th century) allegedly born in St Albans.
• Robert Runcie (1921-2000) Bishop of St Albans, later Archbishop of Canterbury
• Allan Prior, TV script writer, co-creator of Z Cars and writer of The Charmer and father of Maddy Prior lives in St Albans (and Maddy grew up here)
• Jim Rodford (b. 1941), musician, member of Argent and The Kinks and cousin of Rod Argent
• Samuel Ryder, founder of the Ryder Cup