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Eleanor Cross Road, WALTHAM CROSS, EN8 7FH

Apart from the Eleanor Cross, the small town of Waltham Cross is quite remarkably unattractive, ruined by unsympathetic commercial developments and a busy perimeter road. The post office in the bus station has been relocated to the local W.H. Smith, now a common feature in towns all over the country.

One of the three remaining of the original 12 Eleanor crosses erected by King Edward I to mark the overnight resting places of the funeral cortege of Queen Eleanor, following her death in Harby on November 28th 1290. Architecturally, it follows the same design as the cross at Northampton and the lost crosses of Cheapside and Charing in London, though more Decorated in style. Hexagonal in plan, it rises through diminishing stages of blind tracery with heraldic motifs, through a second tier of six elaborate pinnacled canopies. These house three statues of Eleanor in traditional pose by master mason Alexander of Abingdon, to a third hexagonal tier of blind tracery surmounted by a cross. Waltham Cross has somehow miraculously survived more than 700 years of adversity including Civil War, encroachment by adjacent buildings, road schemes for turnpikes, the misguided intentions of Victorian restorations and bombs dropped during the Second World War. It now stands much restored and rather ignominiously as the centrepiece of a modern pedestrian shopping area.

Plaque commemorating the restoration of the Eleanor Cross in 1989 on the centenary of Hertfordshire County Council.

Looking across towards the Moon and the Cross Wetherspoon, with the Embassy Gala Bingo, formerly cinema, to the right.