On your right is a low, timber-framed pub with a long pale rendered frontage and a hanging sign marked by a boot.
The Boot looks settled and companionable, but it keeps some very old company. What seems like a single inn is actually two buildings joined together, and local historians say part of it already stood here when the First Battle of St Albans tore through the town on the twenty-second of May, fourteen fifty-five. The Battlefields Trust later honoured that link, treating it as a pub touched by the battlefield and presenting landlord Will Hays with an interpretation panel in two thousand and thirteen. The photo in the app lets you catch that slightly irregular historic frontage for yourself. It has changed names as well as owners. Ghost lore remembers it first as the Blue Boar, then the Old Wellington. From seventeen forty-three to seventeen sixty-two, William Draper owned this place and also leased the Clock Tower and the Fleur de Lys, quietly linking several St Albans landmarks under one man’s hand. By the eighteen eighties, poet William Austen had already folded The Boot into the city’s literary memory.
Then the stories turn deliciously strange. Builders reportedly found dried flowers hidden behind a wall, and after they disturbed them, jukeboxes and fruit machines were said to switch themselves on and off. Another tale tells of a murdered woman whose ghost never quite left.
If you fancy calling back later, it is moderately priced and generally opens from noon, with an earlier opening on Saturdays.
The Boot holds St Albans history the way an old cellar holds echoes. When you are ready, continue on to The Cock for our final stop.
