On your right, look for a low timber-framed pub with a pale plastered front, a long sloping roofline, and a stout central brick chimney.
The Hare and Hounds looks settled, almost modest, yet it is a far more complicated creature than its face suggests. It is Grade Two listed, meaning legally protected for its historic character, and the official description says seventeenth century or earlier. But Roderick Douglas, drawing on Wessex Archaeology’s survey from two thousand and seventeen, noticed something most passers-by never suspect: the oldest surviving roof timbers may be earlier in feel than the basic listing lets on. That queen-strut roof, a timber frame with upright posts bracing the span, belongs to the seventeenth to early eighteenth century, and the great brick chimney in the western three bays, the building’s structural sections, probably belongs to the first house here.
And it did not stay that first house for long. Two bays joined the east side in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a south extension followed in the late nineteenth, and another single-storey piece arrived between nineteen twenty-four and nineteen thirty-seven. Each addition kept the place useful, but each one also altered what later generations think they are seeing.
Its beginning is slightly disputed too: some say it appears on maps by sixteen fifty, while archaeology only confirms it by seventeen twenty-one. Either way, by the early eighteenth century this was already an old, altered building, standing detached at the edge of Sopwell Lane, where coaches entered St Albans and travellers paused before the city properly began. If you glance at the image in the app, you can see that roadside poise for yourself.
Even now, the work continues: a major reinvention revived it in twenty twenty-three, and repair plans followed in twenty twenty-four. Places like this carried horses, goods, rumours, and weary people through the city’s thresholds; our next threshold, The Old Kings Arms, is about an eleven-minute walk away. If you return later, it is a moderately priced pub, generally open from noon until late every day.
