Canterbury Cathedral

Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the Church of England and of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Augustine, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo-Saxons, founded it in 597. After a fire in 1067, the first Norman archbishop, Lanfranc, rebuilt it from 1070, and it has been growing and changing ever since, so that the building is a textbook of English church architecture from the Romanesque crypt to the soaring Perpendicular nave. It forms a World Heritage Site together with the ruins of St Augustine's Abbey and the ancient church of St Martin.

The event that made Canterbury one of the great pilgrim destinations of Europe happened on 29 December 1170, when four knights of King Henry II murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket in the northwest transept. Becket was quickly made a saint, and pilgrims poured in, like those of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The spot where he died, known as the Martyrdom, is marked by an altar of 1986 and a sculpture of a cross flanked by two swords by Giles Blomfield, whose shadows complete the four blades of the knights.

When fire gutted the choir in 1174, the rebuilding by the French master mason William of Sens, and after his fall from the scaffolding by William the Englishman, replaced the old work with the new Gothic style of pointed arches, rib vaults and flying buttresses. East of the choir, the Trinity Chapel was raised in 1180–84 to house Becket's shrine, which stood there, covered in gold and jewels, until it was destroyed at the Reformation. The chapel still holds the tombs of Edward the Black Prince and King Henry IV, and its windows include the 12th-century Miracle Windows, which tell stories of cures at the shrine. The nave was rebuilt from the late 14th century under the master mason Henry Yevele, and the central Bell Harry Tower has a fan-vaulted ceiling you look up into from the crossing.

Below everything lies the crypt, which survived the fire of 1174 and since 2011 has held Antony Gormley's sculpture Transport, made from iron nails taken from the cathedral roof. In about 1576 part of it was granted to Canterbury's Huguenot congregation for their church. The main entrance from the city is through Christ Church Gate, whose figure of Christ, by Klaus Ringwald, was installed in 1990.

Getting there

The cathedral is in the centre of Canterbury. London Southend Airport (SEN) is about 42 km away by straight line, but it lies across the Thames Estuary, and most international visitors come via London and continue by train: Canterbury West has had direct high-speed services to London St Pancras since 2009, and the city has a second station, Canterbury East. The cathedral is a working church with services through the day; check visiting times before you go.