This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
United Kingdom gathers four cities recording English Christianity's medieval authority, a decisive synod, and one modern religion born in a suburban cottage.
London has been the administrative center of English Christianity since the medieval period, St Paul's Cathedral its bishop's seat and Westminster Abbey the coronation church of English and British monarchs since 1066. The break with Rome under Henry VIII made it the working capital of a state church whose supreme governor is the monarch, and the dissenting congregations that grew up outside it, Quakers, Baptists and Methodists among them, did much of their organizing there; it is today one of Europe's most religiously plural cities, with large Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish populations.
Durham grew up around the shrine of Cuthbert, whose relics monks carried from Viking raids on Lindisfarne and finally enshrined there in 995; its Norman cathedral also holds the Venerable Bede's remains, and for centuries its bishops governed the surrounding county as prince-bishops with their own courts, coinage and army.
Whitby's double monastery of monks and nuns, ruled by the abbess Hild, hosted the 664 synod that decided the Northumbrian church would keep Easter and the tonsure by Roman rather than Ionan reckoning, drawing the English church into the western mainstream; Bede records that the poet Caedmon received his gift there.
St Albans carries no ancient association of its own; its significance is one mid-twentieth-century episode, when Gerald Gardner acquired a cottage near Bricket Wood in the early 1950s and ran the coven historians call the Bricket Wood coven, through which Wicca first took durable shape, initiating Doreen Valiente, later Gardner's High Priestess and co-author of much of its liturgy.