IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Langley Hill, KINGS LANGLEY, WD4 9HH

The surviving building of the former Dominican priory established in 1308 by Edward II, next to the Royal Palace of Kings Langley. Although much restored this is the only surviving building from the medieval palace complex. It is now part of Rudolph Steiner School, Kings Langley and is used for staff accommodation. The foreground allotments are also part of the school.

This was nothing compared with the two mile diversion ahead in Watford.

Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social thinker and educator, and the founder of the spiritual philosophy of anthroposophy, in which he postulated the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development, more specifically through conscientiously cultivating a form of thinking independent of sensory experience. There are now over 900 schools worldwide, known as a Steiner or Waldorf schools, that are designed to provide an education following these principles. This one is in Kings Langley at the top of Langley Hill, near Image

This image was taken in late September. The leaves on the trees are starting to turn golden.

Not the Royal Palace, the site of which is here Image, but a pub in the hamlet of Kings Langleyhill, as it is described on old Ordnance Survey maps. The pub is 17th century so post-dates the demise of the Royal Palace by at least 100 years.

View of the school from the basket ball court. The original Victorian house which formed the nucleus for the school is in the centre. The theatre and other large rooms are to the left. The classroom block is to the right. The school occupies the site of the Plantagenet Royal Palace of Langley.

The former Royal Palace at Kings Langley was built under the supervision of Eleanor of Castile (1241 - 1290), wife of King Edward I. It appears to have been started around 1276 and to have been completed by 1299. This is how the village of Langley got its epithet Kings. Edmund de Langley, the first Duke of York and fifth son of King Edward III, was born here in 1341. Around 1349, during the outbreak of plague, known as the Black Death, King Edward III used the Royal Palace as his seat of government away from London. The Palace seems to have fallen into disuse during the Wars of the Roses, and was demolished around 1469. Apart from occasional underground finds during construction works for the nearby Image nothing remains of the former structure. The Ordnance Survey 1:10,000 scale map shows the centre of the site to be in the rear gardens of the houses in the photograph, probably the second house from the right being where the actual symbol is. This photograph was taken from the footpath leading south.

Viewed looking north eastwards from Love Lane, the red netting surrounds the cricket pitch.

Chipperfield Road in Kings Langley, in western Hertfordshire.