Canterbury’s History: 20 Places and the Stories Behind Them

1. Canterbury Cathedral and the murder of Thomas Becket

The first thing I remember about the Martyrdom is that two of the swords are shadows. The other two are blades in the modern memorial. Together they stand for the four knights who killed Thomas Becket here on 29 December 1170. It’s a surprisingly small corner of the cathedral for the end of an argument that had reached the king and the pope.

Henry II had made his close ally and former chancellor archbishop in 1162. It seemed a good way to have somebody he trusted at the head of the Church. They fell out over what the Crown could ask of it. Henry wanted clergy accused of crimes to answer to royal justice. Becket defended the independence of the Church’s courts. He spent years in exile, and came back in 1170 after an uneasy reconciliation. They were already at odds again by the time the knights arrived.

What happened after the murder is the part I go back to in the glass. People reported healings at Becket’s tomb and he was made a saint in 1173. In the Miracle Windows you can follow people setting off, looking after the sick and asking for help. Some of their stories were collected by the monk Benedict of Peterborough. Eight of the original twelve windows survive, made between about 1180 and 1220. I find the scenes easier to take in one at a time. Somebody in each of those little pictures had a reason to make a journey.

The Martyrdom, the crypt and the Trinity Chapel give you three points to hold on to in a building that changed considerably around the pilgrims. Becket was killed at the first, buried in the second and moved to a shrine in the chapel in 1220. The western crypt is early twelfth century. The eastern crypt and the Trinity Chapel came out of the rebuilding after a fire in 1174. Much of the nave belongs to work that began in the late fourteenth century. Outside the cathedral somebody had to make the travellers’ flasks, feed them and find them beds. At Eastbridge Hospital you can stand in a room where some of those people could get a bed.

Henry VIII ordered the shrine destroyed in 1538. The monastery was dissolved in 1540 and a new Dean and Chapter followed the next year. There’s an odd feeling to the empty shrine site in the Trinity Chapel. All around it, in the windows, people are still on their way.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

2. St Augustine’s Abbey and Canterbury’s first scholars

Greek, Latin, poetry and the date of Easter. You could study all of that in seventh-century Canterbury with an abbot from North Africa and an archbishop from Tarsus, in what is now Türkiye. Hadrian was the abbot and Theodore the archbishop. Their pupils studied scripture and astronomy too. Bede wrote about students who learnt both languages. Those are the two people I like to start with at Longport. With just a few walls left, it’s easy to miss how far the abbey’s connections reached.

The monastery was founded shortly after Augustine arrived in 597. King Æthelberht gave land beyond the city walls, where the kings who backed the mission and the early archbishops could be buried. Burial outside the walls followed older custom. On the plan you can see several churches packed together. You begin to understand the problem of wanting a bigger abbey on ground where people already had places they revered. In the eleventh century Abbot Wulfric began an octagonal building to join two churches. Its crypt survives. After the Conquest, Abbot Scolland began a great Romanesque church that absorbed or replaced earlier work.

The abbey became confident enough to guard its independence from the archbishops and win papal privileges, including the right for its abbots to wear a mitre. In 1538 John Essex, the last abbot, surrendered it to Henry VIII with thirty monks. They received pensions. Much of the church was pulled down, and the abbot’s lodging became part of a royal palace. The bit of Tudor brick above older masonry on the north wall gives you some idea of how much the next owners kept. Later the site made room for a brewery, pleasure gardens and, in the nineteenth century, a missionary college.

The library was scattered. English Heritage has identified 283 surviving books. Think of that number alongside the low walls on the site plan. It gives you another way to picture a place where people spent so much of their lives learning.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

3. St Martin’s Church and Queen Bertha’s Canterbury

Augustine arrived in 597 to find a Christian queen already at the Kentish court. Bertha was a princess from the Frankish world, married to Æthelberht, the pagan king of Kent. She had a place to worship and a chaplain, Bishop Liudhard. Bede, writing in the eighth century, describes the missionaries using St Martin’s for prayer, preaching and baptism. With Æthelberht’s support, the mission went on to develop the much larger institutions of the abbey and cathedral. All three now form Canterbury’s World Heritage property. St Martin’s is the one that makes it easiest for me to think about the people of one household.

I remember looking at the flat red bricks in the south wall and wanting to know which part of it Bertha might have recognised. There are whole courses of brick in one section. Close by, bricks are mixed with flint and stone. Roman bricks were reused, as they were at St Mildred’s. You can date a brick without knowing when somebody put it in that particular wall. Archaeologists and historians have proposed different sequences. Some fabric may belong to the church associated with Bertha, some to work done in the seventh century. There’s enough for a good look at the wall even if the precise answer is still open.

The little gold medalet gives you another way of getting at that household. It turned up in the churchyard in 1844, bears Liudhard’s name and dates from around 590. World Museum in Liverpool holds the original and the Beaney has a copy. The church acquired a bigger chancel in the Middle Ages and its squat tower in the fourteenth century. People still worship here. I find it rather moving that a name from the very beginning of the story turned up beside a church people still use.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

4. Canterbury Roman Museum and the house beneath the shops

I went to the Roman Museum for the mosaic and came away thinking about the person who had to keep the bath warm. The mosaic is still where it was found, under Butchery Lane. The floor dips and rises under the interlaced borders. The movement came long after the household had gone. It’s easiest to see if you look along the corridor, with the shops still going about their business overhead.

There’s a neat explanation of the heating in the little stacks of plain tiles. They held up a floor with room for heat from a wood-burning furnace to pass underneath it. Channels could carry the heat up the walls. That’s a hypocaust. I’d known the name for it. Seeing the space under the floor gave me a better idea of what somebody had to build and keep supplied with wood.

The floor was first found by drainage workers in 1868, about eight feet below the street. Wartime bombing exposed more ground under the nearby shops. Excavation in the 1940s and again from 1958 to 1962 brought more of the plan to light. An earlier timber building had stood here before an extensive Roman house with a courtyard. The mosaic corridor led towards the bathing suite. Much of the house is still under the surrounding streets. The warm room was part of a household whose full size is harder to take in now.

The smaller objects bring you close to the people who lived in Roman Canterbury. A clay nursing goddess, Dea Nutrix, holds two infants. It’s a glimpse of people’s hopes and worries around childbirth. Silver found during roadworks in 1962 includes spoons with bird-shaped handles and an engraved sea-stag. Another implement carries the Christian Chi-Rho symbol. Its use is uncertain. You can trace the care that went into a spoon handle. Who put the silver away is much harder to recover.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

5. Westgate Towers and the city gaol

Did you know the nineteenth-century prisoners at Westgate had flushing toilets? They had to pump the water up from the Stour themselves. The controls were out in the corridor. That’s the detail I remember when I look at the iron bridge between the round towers and the later prison extension. It’s very easy to admire a great gate from the street. Inside, a gaoler could decide something as ordinary as when a toilet got flushed.

In the late fourteenth century the gate’s builders were thinking about the people they needed to keep outside. A French attack was a real possibility. From the pavement you can pick out the narrow gunloops in both round towers. They gave defenders a way to use early firearms. There was also a drawbridge, a portcullis and room to defend the gate from the battlements. The scale of the towers and their Kentish ragstone told travellers something about the wealth on the other side. An older church above the entrance had to move to a building alongside.

Archbishop Simon Sudbury helped pay for the rebuilding, alongside local taxation. As chancellor, he was associated with the poll tax that helped provoke the Peasants’ Revolt. He was killed in London in 1381.

You get a different sense of authority at the gate from a grocer called Robert Cushman. In 1603 he spent a week in the gaol after getting into trouble over literature attacking the cathedral authorities. He went on to help organise the Mayflower voyage.

The museum opened in 1906. In the Second World War the police had a control room here, and observers on top had a telephone link. Even the siren had equipment to keep it from freezing. That’s the other detail I’m fond of. Centuries after the gunloops went in, there were still people at the gate working out how to keep watch and get a warning out.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

6. Canterbury’s city walls and Riding Gate

At Riding Gate the old flint wall runs into a concrete bridge over Watling Street. I like the plainness of the join. People have been coming into the city at that point since Roman times, and each version of the gate had to make room for whatever was going through.

The Romans built the wall circuit in the later third century, with masonry backed by an earth rampart. Excavation in 1986 found enormous foundation blocks at the gate held together with iron clamps set in lead. There were two carriageways between guard chambers. Archaeologists also found traces of a wooden door. One passage was closed off and used for industry. Even then, someone had found a better use for part of a gate than letting people through it.

The walls could be breached. A Viking army captured Canterbury in 1011 and took Archbishop Alphege hostage. He was killed at Greenwich the following year. King Cnut arranged for his remains to come back to Canterbury in 1023. The city had a murdered archbishop’s tomb to visit well before Becket’s.

In 1363 an inquiry found the ditches obstructed and stone taken from the walls. With French raids a threat, much of the circuit was rebuilt over the following decades with towers and a wall walk. A levy on goods coming in, called murage, helped pay for it. Trade coming through the walls paid for some of the city’s ability to shut them.

The medieval gate was in the way of larger vehicles by 1782, when it came down. There was a brick arch in James Simmons’s day and an iron bridge by the local Biggleston firm in the nineteenth century. After wartime damage, the concrete crossing followed in 1970. I find it easier to like that bit of concrete once I know how many Canterbury builders have had a go at the same problem.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

7. Dane John Gardens and James Simmons’s public garden

James Simmons spent about £1,500 making a garden for Canterbury and ended up in a row over £8. That’s the bit of the Dane John story I enjoy telling. Simmons ran a newspaper, was involved in banking and milling, and was mayor twice. He leased the ground in 1790 and estimated the work would cost £450. There were formal walks and planting, and he added about four metres to the height of the mound. If you walk to the pillar, you’ll feel where some of the money went.

The mound already had a history of its own. The Normans made a castle mound here after the Conquest, possibly over an earlier burial ground. Dane John is associated with donjon, a French word for a castle keep. From the lower path you can see how close the mound is to the city wall. It’s worth getting that view before thinking about the work Simmons took on. He was making a garden out of a much older piece of the city.

F. H. Panton’s study of the city records describes the Guardians of the Poor asking Simmons for an £8 annual poor rate. He paid, took offence and gave the garden back. By early 1796 the city had accepted it. He was still helping in 1801, when a food shortage prompted him to sell flour from his mill below the market price. The corporation thanked him for that.

The pillar at the top was paid for by public subscription in 1803. Its inscription records what Simmons put into the garden and what the city agreed to do with it. The bandstand below is a modern replica. I always think of that £8 when I read the inscription. There’s a whole argument about who looks after a public place behind what looks, from the path, like a simple thank-you.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

8. Canterbury Castle from Norman keep to coal store

I’d taken the keep for most of Canterbury Castle until I realised how much of the view from Castle Street belonged to it as well. The road crosses the old bailey, a four-acre enclosure. Part of the Roman town wall formed its southern side. The way in from that direction was through Worthgate, a Roman gateway reinforced in the Middle Ages. It came down in 1791. The street still helps you get the size of the place into your head.

Then there are the houses you have to imagine taking away. When the Normans moved the castle here from the Dane John area in the 1080s, Domesday records fourteen houses belonging to tenants of St Augustine’s Abbey lost to the castle site and eleven more to the ditch. The abbey received churches in compensation. The people in the houses had to move. I find the numbers make more sense with the ground in view. This was a much bigger change to the city than putting up one formidable building.

Much of the surviving keep went up under Henry I in the early twelfth century. Canterbury, Rochester and Dover were royal castles on the routes between the coast and London. The builders reused Roman material. You came in by outside stairs to the first floor, where there was a great hall, a kitchen and large chambers. The darker floor below was probably for storage. I look for the marks of lost floors where they meet the windows. Researchers working on a reconstruction had details like a fireplace with herringbone masonry and traces of pale Caen stone to work with, as well as the other two castles for comparison.

The keep became a gaol and was taken by rebels in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The Gas, Light and Coke Company bought it in 1825 for coal and coke. Worries about stability led to the removal of the upper floor and internal walls. The council acquired it in 1928. You can read another part of the history on a street sign. Gas Street is a reminder of what people were prepared to do with those great Norman walls when they needed somewhere to put the coal.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

9. Eastbridge Hospital and a bed for the pilgrims

I can still picture the short round piers in Eastbridge’s undercroft. Five bays long and two across. The later rules provided for twelve pilgrims and limited their stay. That’s the number I come back to when I look at people travelling to Canterbury in the cathedral’s glass. A bed was part of what made a pilgrimage possible, and the hospital had to be ready for the next people who needed one.

A merchant called Edward FitzObold founded Eastbridge in the late twelfth century. A hospital here meant shelter and care. It stood near the busiest approach to Becket’s shrine and gave travellers in need somewhere to stay. Mills, land and other property helped pay for it. A smaller hospital was joined to it in the thirteenth century. It’s worth looking up as well as down when you visit. Above that room with the short piers are a refectory with a medieval wall painting and a chapel with a bell cage in the roof. There was a lot to fit in beside the river.

After the Reformation ended pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine, the building needed another use. Archbishop Matthew Parker supported a school here and endowed scholarships in 1569 for King’s School pupils going to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. There’s a tradition that Christopher Marlowe studied in the schoolroom, though his attendance here is unconfirmed. Under Parker’s successor, John Whitgift, the accommodation came to be used more for local people in need.

Eastbridge still has residents. They’re known as indwellers, as at St John’s. The pilgrims needed a bed for the night. The people who live at Eastbridge today need somewhere to call home. It’s a nice thing to find on a busy High Street, an old place still in the business of making room for people.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

10. Greyfriars and the Franciscan Gardens

From the public Greyfriars Garden the little building on two arches looks so complete that I used to think of it as the friary. It’s usually called Greyfriars Chapel. The historic listing reads it as a guest house or the warden’s lodging. Most of the friary is gone, though a remnant of the church survives in the boundary of Greyfriars Passage. There was once room here for a whole community, which is the bit I wanted to understand about an order committed to poverty.

The first Franciscan mission reached England in 1224, while Francis of Assisi was still alive. Canterbury was its first English settlement. The Poor Priests’ Hospital helped the friars find a home beside the Stour, close to the people they wanted to reach through preaching and practical work. They needed somewhere to sleep, study and pray themselves. In the later thirteenth century gifts of land allowed a stone friary to take shape. The city held the land on the friars’ behalf, so they could have the use of it under the order’s rules on ownership. Their church was consecrated in 1325.

The friars surrendered the property in 1538. One of the building’s later uses is harder to get at. Names and dates were cut into woodwork in a room thought to have held people awaiting transportation. They give you something tangible to go on while leaving the use uncertain. Other owners found room for commercial growing, tea gardens and market gardens. I like knowing about those different uses when I look across the river. Today Eastbridge cares for the medieval building and the paid Franciscan Gardens. The view from the separate public garden still gives you those two arches and a reason to wonder what used to be around them.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

11. Blackfriars and the two halls beside the Stour

The Blackfriars had their meals on one side of the Stour and received guests on the other. From the public path by Solly’s Orchard you can put the two surviving halls together in one view. There’s the refectory and the old guest hall, now Beerling Hall. I find the water between them as helpful as the buildings. It gives you an idea of the amount of ground the friary once needed.

Henry III gave the Dominicans land in 1237 and helped pay for building over the next two decades. By 1259 the recorded payments were close to £500. They dedicated their church to Edward the Confessor, a saint the king particularly revered. It’s an interesting arrangement to set beside Greyfriars, where the city held land for the Franciscans. Here you can put a king’s name to much of the money that went into the buildings.

The Dominicans were Friars Preachers. Their dark cloaks over white habits earned them the name Blackfriars. Church and accommodation gathered round a cloister, with kitchens, guest space and an orchard across the wider precinct. The windows of the refectory are a good place to pause. Its floor seems to have been raised, probably because of flooding, and the windows preserve something of the older levels. The river that helps you read the plan also gave the friars something to contend with.

After the suppression in 1538, a weaving factory occupied the site and parts of the friary came down over the next century. The refectory served dissenting congregations, including Unitarians, and was also used for storage. The King’s School archive records it reopening as an art centre in 1983 after restoration with help from the Cleary Foundation. The couple who helped rescue the guest hall gave their name to Beerling Hall. I like that two big rooms built for meals and visitors could keep finding people who needed the space.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

12. Poor Priests’ Hospital and the changing terms of charity

The detail from the Canterbury workhouse accounts that sticks with me is making hop bags. In 1746 there was also knitting, sewing and spinning hemp and flax. Children as well as adults worked, and what they made helped pay for their upkeep. I’d known the frontage on Stour Street as the Poor Priests’ Hospital. The workhouse accounts made me want to know who ended up inside and who got to decide how they spent the day.

The pointed chapel window is the easiest bit to pick out from the street. Around it you can read the outline of a household with rooms for prayer, meals and accounts. Archaeologists have traced a stone house on the site to Lambin Frese, a Canterbury moneyer who acquired premises here in the 1170s. Alexander of Gloucester later obtained the property for a foundation for poor, old or ill priests, established around 1220. An inquiry in 1343 found the place in poor repair. Much of the surviving medieval work is from the fourteenth century, when Thomas Wyke was master. He had a room upstairs, and there was a great hall and a chapel.

The hospital was surrendered in 1575 and Elizabeth I granted it to the city. A Blue Coat school and a Bridewell, or house of correction, followed. The historian Sheila Sweetinburgh describes how officials distinguished between people they thought deserved help and those they classified as idle or disorderly. Boys could be prepared for apprenticeships. Adults could be confined and made to work in the same complex.

In 1727 an Act put poor relief for fourteen parishes under one body of guardians, and the old hospital and its income helped support the workhouse. That’s how those hop bags came into the life of a place built for priests.

The building later housed a clinic and the Canterbury Heritage Museum, which closed in 2018. The Marlowe’s project, The Hive, plans to use the historic rooms for heritage and creative work with young people. The window on Stour Street still belongs to the old chapel. The workhouse accounts give you a very different idea of a day spent in the building. What stays with me is how much of somebody’s day could depend on whether officials thought they deserved help.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

13. St Mildred’s Church and the stones Canterbury used twice

The fireplace is what I remember most clearly about the Attwood Chapel at St Mildred’s. Thomas Attwood, who served four times as mayor, provided the family chapel in 1512 so that prayers would be said for the dead. I’d thought about the people the prayers were for. The Tudor-arched fireplace made me think of the person who had to turn up to say them in the middle of winter. Long after the chantry was founded, the room still needed a fire. The parish’s history records an eighteenth-century grate added when people changed from wood to coal.

You can find the chapel from outside by its chequered flint and stone at the south-east corner. A will from 1486 mentions work on the nave and a new vestry, and there were larger windows, aisles and roofs to make room for over the years. Along the south wall, some very large corner stones stand out against the flint and rubble. The early nave is usually dated to shortly before the Norman Conquest, and the builders probably took those blocks from Roman buildings. Some of the stone was old before there was a church to keep in repair.

The Mildred of the dedication was an abbess of Minster-in-Thanet. Her relics came to St Augustine’s Abbey in the eleventh century, and the church belonged to the abbey until it was suppressed in 1538. There’s an appealingly ordinary side to the things that survive inside. A pulley helped lift the cover of the late-medieval font. A stone pulpit was painted to look like wood. The register records Izaak Walton’s wedding to Rachel Floud in 1626. I like finding Walton through Rachel Floud and a date in a register. It’s as much a part of the life of this church as the stones somebody had to find to build it.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

14. St Dunstan’s Church and Margaret Roper’s family story

I knew the story about Thomas More’s head a long time before I knew that his daughter could read Greek. It’s Margaret Roper I think of now at the gateway opposite St Dunstan’s. She knew Latin too, and her English translation of Erasmus on the Lord’s Prayer appeared anonymously in 1526. More encouraged her to study. He was much warier of what it might mean for her to become known as a writer. She’s worth spending a little time with in her own right.

I read the letter More sent Margaret from the Tower in May 1535 differently once I knew about her translation. She’d done some thinking of her own about matters of faith. Now her father was telling her how Thomas Cromwell, on the king’s behalf, had pressed him for his views on Henry’s claim to be head of the Church in England.

More knew what it was to use the power of his office. The lawyer and author of Utopia had become lord chancellor in 1529 and had pursued people accused of heresy and opposed Protestant books. After Henry VIII broke with Rome, More refused the oath required of him in 1534 and was imprisoned. He was convicted of treason and executed on Tower Hill in July 1535.

His body was buried at the Tower and his head was displayed on London Bridge. According to the family’s tradition, Margaret recovered the head and it came to the Roper vault in St Dunstan’s. The vault is closed. The view from the pavement gives you the gateway across the road, and somewhere to put Margaret and her husband William in the city. Together they helped preserve More’s writing. It was Margaret’s own work that made me want to read his letter to her.

There’s another reason the church’s position matters. It stood on the London road outside Westgate. In 1174 Henry II stopped here to begin his public penance for the murder of Becket, before he went into the city.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

15. St George’s Tower and the Canterbury Marlowe knew

At St George’s you can pin Christopher Marlowe to a place and a date. His birth date is uncertain. His baptism is in the register, on 26 February 1564, at the church that stood beside this tower. He was baptised in an octagonal font. There’s a plaque under the clock, which I find particularly helpful here. With the shops around it, it takes a moment to remember you’re looking at what’s left of a parish church.

His father John was a shoemaker and his mother Katherine came from Dover. The family lived in the parish, in a city that saw outbreaks of plague. A house across the street was traditionally identified as his birthplace. School at the King’s and a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, took him a long way from the world the register puts him in. I love the reach of the plays that came out of that life. In Doctor Faustus, a scholar wants knowledge and power badly enough to bargain away his soul. In Tamburlaine the ambition seems to get bigger every time somebody opens their mouth. Marlowe did it with blank verse, those unrhymed lines with a regular beat. A Privy Council letter about his Cambridge degree refers to service for the queen. There’s plenty of speculation about what he did, and much that the evidence leaves open.

Much of the tower is fifteenth-century, with an earlier round-headed doorway. The projecting clock came in 1836. About thirty years later the church was enlarged for parishioners from St Mary Magdalene. The raid of 1 June 1942 devastated St George’s and destroyed the house associated with Marlowe. The shell stood for about ten years. Look at the open ground beside the tower and you can see how much of the church came down. The baptism register can still be wonderfully precise about a place that’s largely gone.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

16. St John’s Hospital and nine centuries of providing homes

People still live behind the timber gatehouse on Northgate. The room over the entrance gives it the look of a very old house, and it’s the bit you can see from the street. It’s sixteenth-century. St John’s Hospital had already been here for centuries by then.

Try to picture a dormitory for sixty people. Archbishop Lanfranc founded St John’s around 1085 for thirty men and thirty women who were poor or infirm. He also set up the hospital at Harbledown, which cared particularly for people with leprosy. The dormitory here was about sixty-two metres long, with men and women housed separately, a double chapel at right angles and two communal privies. Those last two are the bits I’d ask about on an arranged visit. You can learn a lot about the scale of a household from what it needed to get through an ordinary day.

The chapel helps you work out what happened to all that space. There were two aisles side by side. The present chapel takes up part of one. Some of the building came down in the eighteenth century and the arcade was filled in. Later work moved an early doorway and changed the interior again. The blocked arches and the surviving windows help you place what’s left of the chapel on the old plan.

St John’s survived the Dissolution. As late as 1674 a record lists eighteen Brothers and twenty Sisters living here. Much of the shared accommodation eventually gave way to smaller houses round a courtyard. The charity still provides homes for older people with local ties who can live independently. Residents are called indwellers, as at Eastbridge. I think of that long dormitory when I look at the gatehouse now. The need for a home has stayed. What somebody could expect of a home has changed enormously.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

17. The Old Synagogue and Canterbury’s Jewish community

The railway is the reason Canterbury’s Old Synagogue is on King Street. The congregation lost its earlier place of worship at St Dunstan’s to railway development. When Sir Moses Montefiore laid the foundation stone in 1847, the architect Hezekiah Marshall was giving the new building its Egyptian entrance. Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler consecrated it in 1848. A ritual bath house was added in 1853.

I remember the little obelisk gateposts and the lotus capitals. You can see the brick behind the rendered frontage if you look along the side. It was later that I learnt what the congregation had brought with them. The ark, the seats and other fittings all came from the old building. Imagine coming through that unfamiliar entrance and settling into a seat you knew.

There had been a Jewish community in medieval Canterbury around what is now Jewry Lane and Stour Street. People traded and had dealings with Christian religious houses, and faced taxation, restrictions and violence. Under Edward I they were expelled from England in 1290. A later president of the congregation, the businessman Henry Hart, served three terms as Canterbury’s mayor. That puts a name to the much later community that made a home on King Street.

The congregation sold the synagogue in 1937. It served as a church hall, and the King’s School bought it in 1982 for music teaching and performances.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

18. The Beaney and the people who paid for public learning

I’ve a soft spot for Charlie, the prize Shorthorn in the Beaney’s Garden Room. In Separated, but not Divorced Thomas Sidney Cooper gives a bull the sort of presence you’d expect from a very grand sitter. He sketched Charlie on a visit to the owner’s estate and worked on the painting between 1874 and 1882. It’s one of the biggest pictures in the room. Cooper grew up in a poor Canterbury family, and in 1868 he started an art school here so other people could get the training he’d struggled to find. That’s the bit about him I always want to tell someone looking at the painting.

People in Canterbury had been paying for chances to learn in smaller ways for years. An earlier institution collected fossils, minerals, birds and objects from overseas, and working men could use a reading room for a penny a week. The corporation took over the museum in 1846 and opened a free library in 1858. There were already readers, students and collections to make room for when James George Beaney’s money came along.

Beaney was born in Canterbury and made his career as a surgeon in Melbourne. He left £10,000 for the education of working men. The city used it to enlarge the museum and library. The foundation stone went down in 1897, and the building opened in 1899 behind those late Victorian gables designed by A. H. Campbell.

Beaney liked to be known. He wrote widely on medicine and spent heavily when subscribers were voting on hospital appointments. His jewellery earned him the name Diamond Jim. He quarrelled with colleagues and stood trial after a patient’s death in 1866. He was acquitted.

I think about the penny when I look back at those gables. Beaney’s gift helped Canterbury build on this scale. A penny a week had once bought somebody somewhere to read. The big gift makes more sense to me when I think about all the people who already wanted a place to learn.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

19. Canterbury West, North Lane and the railway that needed a rope

I’d been through Canterbury West before I learnt that the first trains had left from North Lane. The recessed entrance at the station, with its stucco and fluted Doric columns, looks suitably grand for the beginning of a railway. It opened in 1846 when the South Eastern Railway came in from Ashford. Trains had been going from North Lane to Whitstable since 1830.

The old railway started with a problem on the Stour. The river was difficult to navigate and Canterbury needed a way to get its goods to shipping. A line to Whitstable could do it, and a direct route over the hills and through a tunnel at Tyler Hill kept the distance down. The hills were the catch. Invicta, built by Robert Stephenson and Company, could do part of the work. On the steeper stretches stationary engines pulled the trains up by rope. It’s that change of method in the middle of a short journey that makes this railway so interesting to me.

The passenger service moved to Canterbury West in 1846. At 37 North Lane you can still see the former stationmaster’s house from the pavement. Weighbridge Cottage, the old ticket office, survives nearby along with buildings associated with the stables and forge. Parts are in private use, so take your look from the street. The two addresses together do a better job of telling the railway’s story than either of them on its own.

The line became known as the Crab and Winkle. Passenger trains to Whitstable lasted until 1931 and goods traffic continued into the early 1950s. Invicta is now at Whitstable Museum. Parts of the line are a walking and cycling way. I’d make a separate outing of that if it’s the rope that caught your interest. A slope means a good deal more when you have to get yourself up it.

Back to the comparison grid ↑

20. The Old Weavers’ House and Canterbury’s refugee cloth trade

The gables at King’s Bridge make the Old Weavers’ House look as if it ought to explain itself. I remember looking at the riverside windows and trying to imagine where people would have put a loom to get the light. Much of the timbering and glazing has been renewed. The local historical society’s examples of weavers’ windows take you to other buildings, including one in Turnagain Lane. The people I’ve come to associate with this particular house are Miss Holmes and Miss Philpotts.

Their weaving school moved into the riverside premises in 1899. It taught and employed women and girls who needed work, at a time when Canterbury’s older cloth industry had already declined. It closed in 1914. The school puts names and dates to something I’d tried to read from the windows.

Protestant refugees from the Low Countries settled in Canterbury in the 1560s. Huguenots from France later added to the textile trades. Families brought their faith, contacts and skills in weaving and wool preparation. They still had to work within city rules. Cloth was inspected and sealed, and wholesale sales went through Canterbury freemen. I think that last detail matters. Having a place to live and being able to sell what you made were two quite different things.

The early Walloon makers worked mainly in wool. Silk became more important later. Towards the end of the eighteenth century John Callaway developed Canterbury muslins with silk and cotton yarn. It took generations to get from one kind of cloth to the other. There was a lot of learning in all those changes, which is why I keep coming back to the school. Look at the joist ends under the overhanging upper floor on St Peter’s Street, then take the gables in from the bridge. I still look up at those windows from the bridge. What I picture now is the women and girls at the school, learning to make a living in a city that had already seen its cloth trade change so much.

Back to the comparison grid ↑