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Redbourn sits on Watling Street, the Roman road the whole village grew up beside, and its common has apparently been hosting cricket since before the Great Fire of London.
Redbourn owes its position, more or less, to the Romans. The village sits directly on Watling Street, the ancient road that once connected London to the north and west of England, three miles from Harpenden, four from St Albans, and five from Hemel Hempstead. Being on that road shaped the village from the start, giving it a reason to exist and a route for everyone who passed through it.
Redbourn has been settled since at least Saxon times, and it's recorded in the Domesday Book, the great 11th-century survey commissioned by William the Conqueror. Its parish church, St Mary's, dates from the early 12th century, and around fifty years after that a small priory was founded half a mile away, on Redbourn Common, after the abbot of St Albans Abbey decided to hallow the ground there. That gives the village an unbroken thread of religious and civic life stretching back close to a thousand years.
A village that's been recorded since the Domesday Book has a way of making a modern housing estate feel like the newest arrival in a very long queue.
The heart of Redbourn, both literally and in spirit, is its Common: a large stretch of open grass extending for nearly half a mile, with a road running the entire length through an avenue of fine old elms, leading toward Church End. It's the kind of unhurried, genuinely wide open space that a lot of larger towns simply don't have room for anymore.
Here's the detail that makes Redbourn genuinely remarkable: some Hertfordshire county histories record cricket being played on the common as far back as 1666, the same year as the Great Fire of London. If accurate, that makes Redbourn one of the oldest recorded cricketing locations anywhere in England, a claim most much larger towns can't come close to matching.
Redbourn has managed something a lot of Hertfordshire villages within commuting distance of St Albans haven't: it's grown without losing its sense of being a genuine village, rather than becoming an anonymous suburb. The long common, the old church, the pubs along the main road, all still sit together much as they would have generations ago.
Redbourn rewards exactly the kind of visit that's easy to overlook: a walk down the common under the elms, a look at a church that's stood for nine centuries, and the quiet satisfaction of standing somewhere cricket may have been played since the 17th century. It's a short trip from St Albans or Harpenden, and worth taking on its own terms rather than as a drive-through.
The Social Martini is proud to connect the people and stories that make Redbourn special. 🍸