St Albans Cathedral Choir

St Albans Cathedral Choir
St Albans Cathedral
Members	~25 boy choristers aged 7–14 12 adult Lay Clerks
Music Director	Andrew Lucas (Master of the Music) Tom Winpenny (Assistant Master of the Music)
Headquarters	Sumpter Yard, Holywell Hill, St Albans
Affiliation	St Albans Cathedral
Website	www.stalbanscathedral.org

St. Albans Cathedral Choir is an English Cathedral Choir based in St Albans, Hertfordshire, England. It is made up of around 25 boy choristers aged 7–14 and 12 adult Lay Clerks. In 2003 it appeared in the coronation scene of the film Johnny English. In addition to the original boys-only choir, there is also the St Albans Abbey Girls' Choir founded in 1996.

Unlike many Cathedrals, St Albans does not have its own boarding Choir School (although the choir has strong links with many local day schools, including St Albans School and St Columba's College, St Albans), meaning that services and rehearsals have to be fitted around a normal school week. Choristers are therefore expected to sing at the Cathedral both before and after school on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, on which days Choral Evensong is sung, in addition to an evening rehearsal on Friday and the commitment of up to four services over the weekend. A typical week will involve around 18 hours of singing, and over his seven-year career in the choir a Chorister will spend approximately six months' worth of that singing in the Cathedral.

The choir goes on tours to other countries every other year to perform concerts, with past tours including the United States, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany

The annual Choir Camp was founded by Peter Hurford when he was organist at St Albans and held in the hamlet of Luccombe. The tents used by the choir remained the same since the first Choir Camp in 1958, with most being army surplus from the Second World War. On the Sunday the choir would sing Choral Eucharist in St Mary's, Luccombe for the parishioners, and on each day the choristers and layclerks would go on hikes, often over ten miles in length, around the Somerset countryside. The Camp celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008.