Canterbury pilgrimage

Phil Penfold takes a sentimental trip back to the city he knew as a boy to see what has changed.

Most of us, on leaving school, will have been given some well-meaning advice from the teachers we respected. The Latin master at Gillingham Grammar school was called Terry Jones (no, not of Monty Python) and when I left Kent for Yorkshire, he said: “Don’t ever come back”.

Seeing the look of hurt bewilderment that must have passed across my face, he added, kindly: “What I mean is, if you do return to places, you will generally find them a sad disappointment”.

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He was right. When I did go back to the Medway towns, some decade or so after Terry’s counsel, my school had become a comprehensive on another site, Terry himself had long taken his talents elsewhere, and the great Chatham Dockyard, where my family had laboured for generations, had closed. It was to become a museum and heritage centre, and to later offer “The Dickens Experience”.

Which is why I was a bit worried about going back again. Canterbury had been a family favourite place when we had days out that didn’t involve Westgate, Margate or Camber Sands. Having polished the Standard 10 and packed a splendid picnic into the boot, my father would set off down the A2, through the little villages, Chilham, Wateringbury, Tenterden, and Biddenden which all appeared to have a lush central green and generally a cricket match in progress.

Canterbury claims that the railway to Whitstable, opened in 1830, was the first passenger line in the world. Today it takes as long to get to get here from Charing Cross as it does from Doncaster to Kings Cross and Canterbury West is a depressing little station, unprepossessing and late Victorian.

The Canterbury of the Fifties and early Sixties still bore the scars of the Luftwaffe’s Baedeker raids. One of the most serious losses was the main part of St George’s church, in which Christopher Marlowe, dramatist, spy and rival to William Shakespeare, had been christened.

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Only the tower remained, and it survives to this day. The bomb sites do not. This today is a city of charm, a great many charity shops, and tea shops and cafes named after Canterbury legends: the Chaucer Tearooms, Black Prince Coffee House and the rest.

The last remaining town gate (the Victorians pulled down all the rest) used to be a notorious traffic bottleneck. The Marlowe Theatre, converted from a 1933 cinema, was an eyesore. Now the new Marlowe is a stunning-looking building with a new, warm and user-friendly auditorium. The audience was lapping up Yes, Prime Minister, on the evening I booked.

The centre of the city is the Cathedral, the centre of the worldwide Anglican Communion. One thing that I don’t remember doing as a youngster was having to pay to get in. Today, you do. Just under a tenner, unless you get concessionary rates. But not inside the building itself, at the gatehouse to the precincts, where you are also handed a small printed leaflet explaining why your cash is demanded.

It costs £9,000 a day to run the building, nearly £3m every year. Nearly 200 people are employed by the Cathedral to care for it and to carry out its work. When those who organise these things tried asking for voluntary donations, they were surprised to find that Joe Public was less than generous, and that the money given averaged out about 12p per person.

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The Cathedral, a World Heritage Site, is one of Europe’s crowning glories. Here Archbishop Thomas a Beckett was murdered in 1170 by a group of knights who later fled north to hole up in Knaresborough Castle.

Here the Black Prince, son of Edward III, victor of Poitiers and Crecy, father to the feeble Richard II, is buried in a magnificent tomb. He is surrounded by the great and the perhaps not so good.

The most moving monument is to Major General Richard Abadie and his four sons. The first two were killed in the Boer War, the second pair in the Great War. A sacrifice that even today is deeply affecting.

There are 19 historic building on the “at risk” register, and they are likely to be there for some time. The council has no funds to prevent them from sinking into further disrepair, or falling down entirely. The Roman Museum houses a full mosaic pavement from about 300 AD, and there is, as you’d expect, a Geoffrey Chaucer Canterbury Tales Museum, which seeks to shed light on the story of the pilgrims and their story.

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Despite the Luftwaffe’s worst intentions, there are still many medieval and half-timbered building to enjoy, most of which have the date of their construction carved over the front door. The Old Weaver’s House, used by the Huguenots, is one of the best. It is possibly a sign of the times that the oldest surviving Tudor theatre in Canterbury (once The Shakespeare pub) is now Casey’s Bar.

The economy seems to be driven these days by tourism and students. The University of Kent is here, as are three other seats of learning. And there’s something that links the unlikely quartet of Oz Clarke the wine critic, Anthony Worrall Thompson, the TV chef, cricketer David Gower, and Montgomery of Alamein. They are all old boys of The King’s School which also seems to have produced an abundance of writers, among them Michael Monpurgo, Somerset Maughan, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Hugh Walpole and Patrick Leigh Fermor, as well as the creator of QI and Spitting Image, John Lloyd.

Somerset Maughan, who used his experiences in his novel Cakes and Ale, hated the place. It is now co-educational, and in term times, and in break periods, you can see the pupils wandering around the city street, doing as any teenagers do when they are let out for a little freedom.

Canterbury definitely needs a lot of love lavished on it and as a cathedral city it does not perhaps have the grandeur of Ely, Durham or Lincoln. Nor the spaciousness of York. But it is a friendly place, there are plenty of bargain accommodation deals to be had, and there is much to see and do. And that tomb to the boys of the Abadie family does seem to put a lot of things into sad perspective. Worth the visit alone.

Getting there

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Further information from [email protected] or from the Canterbury Visitor Centre 01227 378100. There is useful information on car parking within the city on www.canterbury.gov.uk/parking. Rail services run by Southeastern, one train per hour from London St. Pancras and generally two trains per hour from Charing Cross, via Ashford and Sevenoaks. The service takes just under two hours.

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