Historian Mark Freeman gives a lecture on what it meant to become a city in 1877, marking the 150th anniversary of St Albans' city status.
Mark Freeman is coming to St Albans Cathedral on Saturday 27 February for a talk called St Albans, 1877: The Beginning of a New City. It's held jointly with the Friends of St Albans Cathedral, and it marks the 150th anniversary of the town being granted city and diocesan status.
That's the bit of local history that puts the whole thing in context. Back in September 1877, the royal charter confirming the elevation was read from the town hall balcony and met with modest celebrations. Not everyone was on board, though: one opponent called it 'a fourth- or fifth-rate market town' and a councillor dismissed it as 'but empty honour'. A century later, the historian Asa Briggs described the town's nineteenth-century growth as 'sleepy', contrasting it with the large industrial centres usually associated with the 'Victorian city'.
Freeman takes that 'sleepy' label and pushes back on it, asking what it actually meant to be a city in the 1870s. He's a professor of social history and education at University College London and president of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, so he's well-placed to look at the town from both a historical and a local angle.
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The talk runs from 14:00 to 15:30 at the Cathedral, Sumpter Yard, AL1 1BY. It's indoors, and it'll be livestreamed and recorded. Tickets are £12.
