Canterbury

• 1. Introduction

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  Canterbury receives a million visitors a year at its cathedral alone, yet the city itself is home to just over 55,000 people. It sits on the River Stour in east Kent, about 55 miles east-southeast of London, and it carries a UNESCO World Heritage designation. The ground here has been occupied since Paleolithic times. Lower Paleolithic axes have been pulled from the area, along with Neolithic and Bronze Age pots. This is a place where one of the highest student-to-permanent-resident ratios in Britain coexists with a Roman city wall and the oldest surviving school in the country. How did a single small city in Kent become a destination for pilgrims from all parts of Christendom? Why do its two railway stations refuse to connect to each other? And what drew Soft Machine, Mahatma Gandhi, and the architects of the Mayflower's lease to the same medieval streets?

• 2. Roman Walls And Saxon Revival

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  In the 1st century AD, the Romans captured the settlement and named it Durovernum Cantiacorum, after the Celtic tribe of the Cantiaci who had made it their main settlement. The Romans rebuilt it on a grid of new streets, adding a theatre, a temple, a forum, and public baths. Its position on Watling Street, relative to the Kentish ports of Rutupiae, Dubrae, and Lemanae, gave it real strategic weight even without a major garrison.

  In the late 3rd century, fearing attack from barbarians, the Romans raised an earth bank around the city and a wall with seven gates, enclosing 130 acres. The reconstructed ancient British name has been read as Durou̯ernon, meaning stronghold by the alder grove. Counted among the 28 cities of Sub-Roman Britain, Durovernum still nearly vanished. After the Romans left Britain in 410, the place was abandoned for roughly 100 years, kept alive only by a few farmers as it decayed.

  Over the next century, Jutish refugees arrived and an Anglo-Saxon community formed inside the old walls, possibly intermarrying with locals. Trades in pottery, textiles, and leather grew, and by 630 gold coins were being struck at the Canterbury mint. The Jutes gave it the Old English name Cantwareburh, stronghold of the Kentish men. That revival would soon make it the place a Viking army chose to besiege in 1011.

• 3. Conquest, Plague, And Charter

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  In 1011 a large Viking army besieged Canterbury and pillaged it. The memory of that destruction shaped the city's response decades later. When William the Conqueror invaded in 1066, the inhabitants did not resist, and William ordered a wooden motte-and-bailey castle built beside the Roman wall. By the early 12th century, that castle had been rebuilt in stone. In 1215 the French Prince Louis captured Canterbury Castle, only to lose his English support after the death of John, who deserted to the young Henry III.

  The Black Death reached Canterbury in 1348. At 10,000 people, the city had the 10th largest population in England, but by the early 16th century it had collapsed to 3,000. In 1363, during the Hundred Years' War, a Commission of Inquiry found the Roman wall eroded by disrepair, stone-robbing, and ditch-filling. Between 1378 and 1402 the wall was virtually rebuilt and new towers added. In 1381, during Wat Tyler's Peasants' Revolt, the castle and Archbishop's Palace were sacked, and Archbishop Sudbury was beheaded in London.

  In 1413, Henry IV became the only sovereign buried at the cathedral. Canterbury received a city charter in 1448, granting it a mayor and a high sheriff, offices it still holds as Lord Mayor and Sheriff. The local appetite for order ran to the eccentric. In 1519 a public cage for talkative women and other wrongdoers was set up by the pillory at the Bullstake, now the Buttermarket, where in 1522 a stone cross with gilt lead stars was raised and painted by Florence the painter.

• 4. The Strangers Who Wove Silk

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  Around 1548, Canterbury hosted the first congregation of so-called refugee strangers in the country. This first Huguenot church was founded in part by Jan Utenhove, who had relocated from Strasbourg, alongside Valérand Poullain and François de la Rivière. When Utenhove travelled to London in 1549, de la Rivière stayed to lead the congregation. The accession of Mary I forced these residents to flee in 1553-4 to Emden, Wesel, Zürich, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, and later Basel, Geneva, and Aarau.

  Under Elizabeth I the strangers returned in stages. In 1561 a group of Huguenots in London were sent to Sandwich, which swelled with refugees from Artois and Flanders. In June 1575 that settlement almost entirely relocated to Canterbury, joined by refugees from the temporary settlements at Rye and Winchelsea. Granted the church of St Alphedge in 1575, within a year the community had begun using the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral as its church. The Church of the Crypt became the nucleus of the Huguenot community.

  By the 17th century, French-speaking Huguenots made up two-fifths of Canterbury's population. They introduced silk weaving, which had outstripped wool weaving by 1676. Their imprint survives in the timber-framed Old Weaver's House. The silk trade itself would not last; by 1820 it had been supplanted by imported Indian muslins, leaving the city to trade largely in hops and wheat.

• 5. Pilgrims, Becket, And The Mayflower

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  In 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine to convert King Æthelberht to Christianity. Canterbury, a Roman town, became the centre of Augustine's episcopal see, and he became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. The Synod of Hertford gave the see authority over the entire English Church in 672. In 978 Archbishop Dunstan refounded the abbey Augustine had built and named it St Augustine's Abbey. The cathedral's main Bell Harry Tower was completed in 1504, ending 400 years of building.

  The murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the cathedral in 1170 made Canterbury one of the most notable towns in Europe. Pilgrims came from all parts of Christendom to visit his shrine, and that pilgrimage framed Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th-century collection of stories, The Canterbury Tales. In 1538, Henry VIII demolished Becket's shrine, sent its gold, silver, and jewels to the Tower of London, and obliterated Becket's images, name, and feasts across the kingdom, ending the pilgrimages.

  The Dissolution of the Monasteries closed the city's priory, nunnery, and three friaries. St Augustine's Abbey, the 14th richest in England, was surrendered to the Crown, its church and cloister levelled. One quieter transaction outlasted the wreckage. In 1620, Robert Cushman negotiated the lease of the Mayflower at 59 Palace Street, securing the ship that carried the Pilgrims to America.

• 6. War And A Citizens' Revolt

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  Charles I and Henrietta Maria visited in 1625, entering the city under a velvet canopy held aloft by six men while musicians played. The mood soured during the English Civil War. In 1647 riots broke out after Canterbury's puritan mayor banned church services on Christmas Day. Known as the Plum Pudding Riots, they led to a trial the following year that helped trigger a Kent revolt against Parliamentarian forces and the second phase of the war. Canterbury itself surrendered peacefully after the Battle of Maidstone.

  The city's defences were eventually dismantled by peacetime, not war. By 1770 the castle had fallen into disrepair and was largely demolished over the following decades. In 1787 every gate in the city wall except the Westgate, then the city jail, was pulled down to ease coach travel. Canterbury Prison opened just outside the city boundary in 1808.

  The Second World War struck hardest. During 135 separate raids, 10,445 bombs destroyed 731 homes and 296 other buildings, killing 119 civilians in the borough. The most devastating raid came on the 1st of June 1942, during the Baedeker Blitz. When the architect Charles Holden drew up plans to redevelop the city centre, locals objected so fiercely that they formed the Citizens' Defence Association, which swept the 1945 municipal elections. Rebuilding did not begin until 10 years after the war.

• 7. Railways, Waits, And The Canterbury Scene

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  On the 3rd of May 1830, the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway opened as the world's first regular passenger steam railway, known locally as the Crab and Winkle line. It went bankrupt by 1844 and was bought by the South Eastern Railway, which linked the city to its network in 1846. The London, Chatham and Dover Railway arrived in 1860. Rivalry between the lines explains an odd legacy: there is no direct interchange between Canterbury West and Canterbury East stations, because rival companies built the two railways into the city.

  Music has a long civic record here. Payments to the city's band of waits appear from 1402, though they likely existed earlier. Disbanded in 1641 for misdemeanors, they were reinstated in 1660 to play for Charles II on his return from exile. The Municipal Corporations Act 1835 finally abolished civic waits nationally. Between 1779 and 1865, Canterbury's Catch Club met weekly in winter, its members singing catches and glees from a library now held in the cathedral's archives.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Canterbury Scene emerged, a cluster of progressive rock, avant-garde, and jazz musicians including Soft Machine, Caravan, Matching Mole, Egg, and Hatfield and the North. Ian Dury, frontman of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, taught Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art. The Marlowe Theatre, named for Christopher Marlowe, who was born in the city, was rebuilt in 2011 with a 1,200-seat auditorium.

• 8. A City Of Students

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  By 2015, Canterbury's student population numbered almost 40,000, drawn to the University of Kent, Canterbury Christ Church University, and the smaller University for the Creative Arts. The city has the highest student-to-permanent-resident ratio in the UK. The University of Kent's main campus covers 600 acres on Saint Stephen's Hill, a mile north of the centre, and enrolled around 20,000 students in 2014. Canterbury Christ Church University began in 1962 as a Church of England teacher training college and became a university in 2005.

  King's School is the oldest secondary school in the United Kingdom. St Augustine established it shortly after his arrival in 597, though its documented history begins only after the dissolution of the monasteries, when it took its present name in honour of Henry VIII. The city's grammar schools include Barton Court, Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, and Simon Langton Girls' Grammar School, the last of which was hit during the wartime bombing.

  The city's older stones still anchor its identity. Canterbury Roman Museum holds an in situ mosaic pavement dating from around 300 AD, and the Dane John Mound was once part of a Roman cemetery. The Old Synagogue, now the King's School Music Room, is one of only two Egyptian Revival synagogues still standing. The ongoing Canterbury Journey project to restore the cathedral, including replacing the nave roof, was expected to cost nearly 25 million pounds.