Canterbury compresses 2,000 years into one walled square kilometre: a Roman townhouse under the pavement, St Augustine's mission of 597, and the transept where four knights murdered an archbishop in 1170. This guide follows the layers in order, oldest first.
Built around an in-situ 2nd-century mosaic floor and hypocaust of a Durovernum townhouse, found when a WWII bomb crater exposed it in 1942. Reconstructed market stalls, Roman silver from the Canterbury Treasure. Open Tue–Sun 10:00–17:00.
The oldest church in the English-speaking world in continuous use — Queen Bertha of Kent worshipped here before Augustine arrived in 597, and Roman brick is visible in the nave's south wall. Part of the Canterbury UNESCO site with the Cathedral and Abbey.
Founded 598 by Augustine as the burial place of the Kentish kings and the first archbishops; dissolved by Henry VIII in 1538 and quarried for a royal palace. English Heritage site with excavated foundations of three Anglo-Saxon churches and the Norman abbey church.
A pilgrims' hostel founded c. 1180 to lodge poor travellers coming to Becket's shrine, still functioning as an almshouse. The undercroft dormitory, the refectory with its 12th-century wall painting of Christ in Majesty, and the chapel survive intact.
One of the three original royal castles of Kent, begun by William the Conqueror c. 1080 in stone by 1120 — the third-largest Norman keep in England. Later a county gaol; the flint-and-ragstone shell still shows fireplaces and latrine chutes.
The Dane John mound is a Roman burial tumulus landscaped into a promenade in 1790; the memorial at its foot honours the Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment), raised in 1572 and one of the oldest line regiments of the British Army.
Canterbury's museum and library in a 1899 mock-Tudor building, holding the city's Anglo-Saxon and Victorian collections, Thomas Sidney Cooper's Kentish landscapes, and material on the 1942 Baedeker Blitz that destroyed a quarter of the walled city.
St George's clock tower stands alone — all that survived of the church where Christopher Marlowe was baptised in 1564, gutted in the raid of 1 June 1942. The 1950s-60s shopfronts around it mark exactly where the firebombs fell.
A walkable rampart on Roman foundations of c. 270–290 CE, refaced in the 14th century with 24 towers, of which about half survive. The Quenin Gate and the Broad Street stretch let you stand on the parapet above the medieval ditch.
Timber-framed riverside houses of 1500 that sheltered Huguenot and Walloon weavers fleeing Catholic persecution in the 1560s — the refugee community that made Canterbury a silk-weaving town. Blackfriars' 1237 refectory stands over the Stour nearby.
Official guided walks led by Canterbury Tourist Guides depart the Buttermarket by the Christ Church Gate, covering Becket's cult, the Huguenots, Marlowe's murder in Deptford, and the Reformation's erasure of the shrine in 1538.
Named for Christopher Marlowe, the Canterbury shoemaker's son who wrote Doctor Faustus and died at 29 in a Deptford lodging-house brawl in 1593. The Stour bank here follows the medieval mill leats that powered the city's tanneries.