Audioguides Canterbury

People have been walking to Canterbury for twelve hundred years. The Romans built Durovernum Cantiacorum here in the 1st century, but the pilgrimage that made the city famous started later, in 1170, when four knights murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket on the stone floor of his own cathedral. Becket was declared a martyr within two years and canonised shortly after. Canterbury Cathedral became the most important pilgrimage destination in England, and Chaucer gave the road to it the most famous storytellers in medieval English literature. The building that drew them all still stands, still functioning, still receiving a million visitors a year in a city that has never quite stopped being defined by that one act of violence in December 1170.

The city inside its Roman walls is dense with consequence.

The ruins of St Augustine's Abbey, where Christianity arrived in England in 597, sit next to a modern university campus. The Norman castle, built by William the Conqueror, survives as a solid keep that children climb over. The river Stour runs through the center quietly, past the Weavers' Houses where Flemish refugees settled in the 16th century and established a weaving industry. Canterbury is 55 miles from London and has always had a different rhythm: slower, more conscious of depth, with the Cathedral's Bell Harry tower rising above every roofline to remind you exactly where you are.