Canterbury Cathedral and the Kent Coast – An Honest Guide
Becket’s murder, Chaucer’s pilgrims and England’s mother church – plus the Church’s Barbados plantations, the price of a cathedral ticket, and a Kent coast from Whitstable to Dover that is far more than white cliffs.
Canterbury and the Kent coast at a glance
Canterbury is where English Christianity, in its Roman form, began – and where it produced its most famous murder. For more than 800 years pilgrims have walked here to the shrine of Thomas Becket; today they arrive by high-speed train from London in under an hour. Half an hour beyond lies the Kent coast: oyster sheds, Victorian resorts, the castle and cliffs of Dover, and the shortest sea crossing between Britain and the European mainland.
- Where: East Kent, about 60 miles south-east of London.
- World Heritage: Canterbury Cathedral, St Augustine's Abbey and St Martin's Church together form one UNESCO site.
- Cathedral entry: about £17 for adults, more on summer weekends under the new seasonal pricing; children go free with a paying adult (maximum two per adult). Attending a service is always free.
- Train: Southeastern high-speed trains from London St Pancras to Canterbury West in about an hour; slower trains from Victoria to Canterbury East.
- Population: a small city of around 55,000, with three universities – in term time, students are everywhere.
- Time needed: one full day for Canterbury; two or three if you add the coast.
The honest picture
Canterbury is beautiful and genuinely historic, but it is not a quiet medieval town. The centre is small and, from late spring to early autumn, crowded with coach parties, day-trippers from London and school groups from across Europe moving in long lines down the High Street. Most of the shops are the same chains you find in any English town. Large parts of the city were destroyed in German air raids in 1942, so much of what you walk through is post-war rebuilding.
The cathedral itself has become expensive. English cathedrals receive no state funding for their running costs and depend on ticket income, but the price of a visit has risen fast, and seasonal pricing now means summer-weekend visitors pay noticeably more than the old flat rate. The workaround is old and honest: Choral Evensong, sung most afternoons, is free and lets you sit in the quire under the medieval glass while one of the best choirs in England sings.
On the coast, the contrasts are sharper still. Margate and Ramsgate on the Isle of Thanet have some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the South-East next to new galleries and London weekenders. Dover is a working ferry port and the place where people crossing the Channel in small boats are brought ashore – a fact that shapes the town and its politics more than any castle.
Canterbury Cathedral: murder, pilgrims and the Black Prince
In 597 a monk named Augustine arrived in Kent, sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo-Saxons. King Æthelberht of Kent, whose Frankish queen Bertha was already a Christian, allowed him to settle in Canterbury, and Augustine became the first Archbishop. Every Archbishop of Canterbury since – head of the Church of England and of the worldwide Anglican Communion, including the Anglican churches of Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda – sits on the throne of his successors here.
The cathedral you see is mostly Norman and Gothic, rebuilt after fires in the 11th and 12th centuries, with the great Bell Harry tower added around 1500. Inside:
- The Martyrdom: the corner of the north-west transept where four knights of Henry II murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170. A modern sculpture of swords marks the spot. Becket was made a saint within three years, and the cathedral became one of the great pilgrimage shrines of Europe – the journey Geoffrey Chaucer turned into The Canterbury Tales.
- Trinity Chapel: where Becket's shrine stood, covered in gold and jewels, until Henry VIII's commissioners destroyed it in 1538 and carted off the treasure. A single candle now burns on the bare floor.
- The tomb of the Black Prince: Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III, lies in gilt bronze armour, with replicas of his surcoat, helmet and gauntlets above him.
- The stained glass: some of the oldest in England, including the 12th-century "miracle windows" that told pilgrims stories of healing at Becket's tomb.
- The crypt: a vast Romanesque undercroft with carved capitals of monsters and musicians – the most atmospheric part of the building.
Enter through Christ Church Gate, the ornate Tudor gateway from the Buttermarket. Buying online is slightly cheaper and saves queuing at busy times. Opening hours are shortened on Sundays and around services – check before you go.
Three World Heritage sites in one walk
St Augustine's Abbey, just outside the city walls, was founded by Augustine himself as the burial place of the first archbishops and the kings of Kent. Henry VIII dissolved it in 1538 and turned part of it into a royal palace; the rest became a quarry. Today it is a field of foundations run by English Heritage, with a small museum and an audio guide that brings it back to life. Quiet, and often almost empty.
St Martin's Church, ten minutes further east, is the oldest church in England still in use – Queen Bertha prayed here before Augustine arrived, and Roman brick is visible in its walls. Entry is free; opening times are limited and run by volunteers.
Together with the cathedral, these two form the story of how Christianity returned to southern England after the Romans left. More on English church history is on our page about abbeys and old churches of Britain.
The city: walls, river and Marlowe
More than half of Canterbury's medieval city walls survive, and you can walk long sections on top, between the Westgate – the largest surviving medieval city gate in England – and the Dane John Gardens. The Westgate Towers have a small museum and a view from the roof.
The River Stour splits into branches through the centre; in summer, students punt visitors past the Old Weavers' House, where French-speaking Protestant refugees, the Walloons and Huguenots, settled as weavers in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Canterbury Roman Museum is built around the floor of a Roman townhouse found after the bombing of 1942. The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge is the city's museum, library and gallery in one Victorian building. Christopher Marlowe, the playwright and Shakespeare's great rival, was born in Canterbury in 1564, and the modern Marlowe Theatre carries his name. Combined tickets for the cathedral with the Roman Museum or the Beaney are sold online.
For food, avoid the High Street chains: the side streets around Sun Street, Palace Street and Northgate have independent cafés, pubs and bakeries. Kent is the "Garden of England" – look for local cherries, apples and hop-heavy Kentish ales, and see our guide to the cuisine of Britain.
The Church of England, Barbados and slavery
The cathedral tour talks about saints and kings. It rarely mentions that the institution governed from Canterbury once owned enslaved people. In 1710 Christopher Codrington, a colonial governor and plantation owner, left two sugar plantations in the east of Barbados to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), the Church of England's missionary society, founded in 1701. The Society ran the Codrington estates as a business with enslaved workers until emancipation in the 1830s. The plantation accounts record the making of an iron collar for an enslaved man, and people on the estates were branded and worked under the whip.
The link reached the very top. Documents in the Lambeth Palace Library show that in 1758 Thomas Secker, then Archbishop of Canterbury, agreed to reimburse £1,093 to the SPG for the purchase of enslaved people for the Codrington plantations. Canterbury's own clergy were involved too: George Stanhope, Dean of Canterbury in the early 18th century, was a leading figure in the SPG.
The Church apologised in 2006 for its role in the slave trade and in running the Codrington estates. In 2023 the SPG's successor, the United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG), apologised for chattel slavery on its plantations, which it called crimes against humanity, and launched a reconciliation project in Barbados with the Codrington Trust. The Church Commissioners have also published research on links between the Church's historic endowment fund and the slave trade. In Barbados, the national reparations task force has argued that this is only a beginning.
The Kent coast: where to go
Our guide to the top 25 coastal towns of Britain covers Margate, Whitstable and Hastings in more depth. From Canterbury, all of these are within about 30–45 minutes by train or bus.
Whitstable
Oysters, weatherboarded sheds and a shingle beach, ten minutes from Canterbury. Lovely on a weekday, gridlocked on a sunny Saturday. Native oysters are eaten in the months with an "r".
Herne Bay and Reculver
Herne Bay is a plain, pleasant Victorian resort. Walk or cycle east along the coast to Reculver, where the twin towers of a ruined medieval church stand inside the remains of a Roman fort, used for centuries as a landmark by ships.
Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate
The three towns of Thanet are very different. Margate has the free Turner Contemporary gallery and the strange Shell Grotto. Broadstairs is the prettiest, a sandy bay where Charles Dickens spent his summers. Ramsgate has the only "Royal" harbour in Britain and the church and house of the Gothic Revival architect A. W. N. Pugin.
Sandwich and Deal
Sandwich is a medieval Cinque Port that the sea left behind – it is now two miles inland, full of timber-framed houses. Deal has a long shingle beach, a pier, Henry VIII's rose-shaped Deal Castle and, next door, Walmer Castle, the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, both run by English Heritage.
Dover
Dover Castle, "the key to England", has guarded the shortest crossing to France since the Normans, and the hill holds a Roman lighthouse, a Saxon church and the Second World War tunnels from which the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 was directed. It is a full day's visit and one of English Heritage's biggest sites – check prices online. The White Cliffs, owned in part by the National Trust, are free to walk along; the car park charges. The town of Dover itself is run-down, dominated by lorries and the ferry port.
Folkestone
An old resort reinventing itself around the Creative Quarter and an outdoor art collection, the Folkestone Triennial works scattered around the town. The Harbour Arm, a converted railway pier, has food stalls and views to France on a clear day.
Getting there and getting around
- From London: Southeastern high-speed trains from St Pancras International to Canterbury West in about an hour, several times an hour; slower, sometimes cheaper trains from Victoria to Canterbury East. Advance tickets and off-peak fares save a lot.
- Around the coast: high-speed trains also serve Whitstable, Margate, Broadstairs, Ramsgate, Dover and Folkestone; Stagecoach buses link Canterbury with Whitstable and Herne Bay frequently.
- By car: the M2 and A2 from London. Use the Park and Ride sites on the edge of Canterbury – parking in the centre is expensive and limited.
- From abroad: Eurostar does not currently stop in Kent, so travellers from Paris and Brussels change at St Pancras. Ferries from Calais and Dunkirk land at Dover; Gatwick Airport is about 1.5 hours away by road – see our Gatwick Airport guide and UK airports guide.
- On foot: the North Downs Way and the Via Francigena pilgrim route both start or pass through Canterbury; the Via Francigena continues from Dover all the way to Rome.
Visiting with a guide
Day tours from London often combine Canterbury Cathedral with Dover Castle and the White Cliffs, or with Leeds Castle – useful if you want to see the coast without changing trains.
Tours and experiences
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome.
Read next
Margate, Whitstable, Hastings and 22 more – honestly.
The other great church of England's history, in London.
Wren's dome and the money of the City.
The Docklands and the Royal African Company.
From Dover to Conwy – where to go and what you pay.
All our guides to England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Canterbury and West Africa
The SPG that ran the Barbados plantations also sent the first Anglican missionaries to the Gold Coast: in 1752 Thomas Thompson sailed to Cape Coast as its missionary, and the African chaplain Philip Quaque, sent to England from Cape Coast as a boy, was ordained and returned to serve at Cape Coast Castle for half a century. Read about the castle on Cape Coast Castle and its neighbour Elmina Castle, and on this site, the Royal African Company and the Gold Coast forts.
The African side of the story
Britain Adventures is an independent partner website. Our partner sites on Africa and its history are where the stories on this page continue:
- Pan-African: African Independence · Uganda · Egypt · Sierra Leone · All African Radio Stations
- Ghana: Ghana-Net · Cape Coast Castle · Elmina Castle · James Fort, Accra · They Made Ghana · War Cemetery Cape Coast
- Across Africa: Kenya Web News · Explore Nigeria · Gambia Vibes · Zambia Vibes
- European history: V2 Rocket and Peenemünde · Tannenberg Memorial
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