Almsworth
Almsworth is the main city of a county to the west of Essex. Its high street was used in the past for transporting coal. A quarry was located in a village named Aybury that has now been subsumed. Stone from that quarry was used to build the local church circa 13th century CE.
The city is named after Saint Almsworth, which may be a derivation of arms-worthy and is purportedly the name of a local influential landowning family[ch. 24].
Layout
Almsworth town centre is concentrated around a shallow hill with a small cathedral at its apex and a cluster of smaller, Church of England-aligned buildings that, halfway down the hill, turn into a shopping district that connects directly to the old town houses by the river. The large bus station is the newest building and has replaced a department store. It extends towards the railway station on one side and the cinema on the other, with chain restaurants and small shops on its upper level and a covered walkway on the ground floor that crosses three side streets and provides shelter to people queueing for the town’s most popular nightclub.
The other modern building is the main shopping center. It is built along the street closest to the station up towards the hill like a collapsed layer cake. Each level is roughly equal in size and juts out from under the floor above, a giant’s staircase leading up to the cathedral, against which the shopping centre’s top-floor semi-open-air café squats as closely as is legally permitted. There is a skirt of thick trees and bushes, voluminous and several layers thick on the graveyard side and trimmed back almost to the bare branch where they intersect with the shopping centre property line, an attempt by the cathedral to limit the sound and sight of commerce.
The rest of the town centre is mostly brick buildings abutting each other, three streets thick along the river, separated by the occasional cramped alleyway. Smaller chain stores and an ever-increasing number of estate agents inhabit the antique buildings.
[ch. 12]
Locations of note
- The Royal College of Saint Almsworth, on the edge of which Dorley Hall is situated.
- Legend, "popularly considered the worst nightclub in Almsworth; also the cheapest."[ch. 1]
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