Canterbury Cathedral
On the evening of 29 December 1170 four knights walked into the north-west transept and cut down the Archbishop of England where he stood. Within three years he was a saint, within fifty the richest shrine in northern Europe stood over his bones, and within four hundred the king had taken every ounce of it away. What is left is a building that records all of that in stone and glass, and a candle burning on an empty floor. This guide walks it object by object.
Fire, murder and the making of a shrine
Augustine, 597
Christianity here is older than the building by five centuries. Augustine landed in Kent in 597 on a mission from Gregory the Great, converted King Æthelberht, and made Canterbury the seat of the English church — which is why the Archbishop of Canterbury, not the Archbishop of York, is Primate of All England and why this is the mother church of some 85 million Anglicans worldwide. The Saxon cathedral burned in 1067, the year after the Conquest, and Lanfranc rebuilt it between 1070 and 1077 on the model of the abbey at Caen. His successors doubled its length by 1130.
Becket
Thomas Becket had been Henry II's chancellor, drinking companion and closest friend. Made Archbishop in 1162 to give the king a pliant church, he became instead its most obstinate defender, and eight years of escalating quarrel ended with Henry's exasperated outburst in Normandy — traditionally, and probably inaccurately, rendered as “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four knights took it as an order: Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton. They crossed the Channel, argued with Becket in his palace, came back armed at dusk, and killed him in his own cathedral while the monks sang vespers.
The reaction was immediate and enormous. Miracles were reported within days. He was canonised on 21 February 1173, fourteen months after his death, which is extraordinarily fast. In July 1174 Henry walked the last mile to Canterbury barefoot and was scourged by the monks at the tomb.
The fire, and the two Williams
Then, on 5 September 1174, sparks from burning cottages outside the monastery gate landed on the roof, and the choir burned. The monk Gervase watched it and wrote the best account of a medieval building project that survives anywhere: the monks tearing their hair, beating the walls, blaspheming against God and the saints.
They brought in a French master mason, William of Sens, who cleared the ruin and began raising a new choir in the new pointed style from the summer of 1175 — some of the earliest Gothic in England. In September 1178, setting the machines to turn the great vault, the scaffold gave way beneath him and he fell about fifty feet. He directed the work from his bed for a time, then went home to France, and died in 1180. Sources give the date of the fall as 1177, 1178 and 1179; Gervase, who was there, anchors it to the solar eclipse of 13 September 1178, so 1178 is the soundest answer.
He was replaced by a man Gervase describes with obvious affection as “William by name, English by nation, small in body, but in workmanship of many kinds acute and honest.” William the Englishman finished the eastern arm, and built the Trinity Chapel and the Corona specifically to house a shrine. On 7 July 1220 Becket's bones were carried up from the crypt and laid in it.
And then Henry VIII
For three centuries this was the richest and most visited shrine in northern Europe. In September 1538 the king's agents took it apart: gold prised off, jewels pocketed, the marble base smashed, the treasure carried away in two coffers and twenty-six cartloads. A proclamation that November declared Becket no saint but a traitor, and ordered his name scratched out of every service book in England — you can still find missals with the word blacked out. What became of the bones is genuinely unknown. The story that Henry summoned the dead man to stand trial is almost certainly a later legend.
The visitor's cheat sheet
| Where | 11 The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2EH |
|---|---|
| Getting there | Canterbury West (trains from London St Pancras, about an hour) or Canterbury East (from London Victoria and Dover), both roughly 15 minutes' walk. No general public parking within the precincts — use a city car park or a Park & Ride |
| Opening hours | Mon–Sat 10am–5pm, last admission 4pm. Sun 11.30am–5pm, also last admission 4pm, but only the grounds and shop are open until 12.30pm — the church itself opens then. Areas close at short notice for services and events; the cathedral publishes a daily closure list |
| Admission | £18 adult October to March, £19.50 April to September, £21 on July and August weekends. Accompanied under-18s free, two per paying adult. Free also for students of the three local universities, and for anyone on Universal Credit or Pension Credit. Worship is always free |
| Worth knowing | Every ticket is valid for a year. Unlimited return visits are included, which almost nobody realises at the till. Booking online is fast-track entry, not a discount — the price is the same |
| Living locally | The Cathedral Pass is £6 and lasts five years, but it is not a Kent pass: it is for people who live within four miles of Bell Harry tower, work in the old city, or belong to a Canterbury diocese church |
| How long | 1–3 hours; allow at least 2 to do the crypt and Trinity Chapel justice, not just the nave |
| Best time | Right at opening, before mid-morning tour groups arrive |
| Dress code | No formal rule; modest, respectful dress as for any working place of worship |
| Photography | Allowed in most areas for personal use; never in the crypt, and not during services |
Hours and admission checked against the official site in September 2026. They change; the official site is always the last word.
The one thing people get wrong. The ticket is valid for a year. Nobody at the desk will stop you paying £19.50, walking round in seventy minutes and never coming back, but you have bought unlimited return visits and there is far more here than one visit holds. Do the nave, crypt and Martyrdom on the first morning and come back for the east end.
What to see, in the order you meet it
Christ Church Gate
You come in through a gatehouse of 1517, built as a memorial to Prince Arthur, Henry VIII's elder brother, whose death made his brother king and changed the history of the building it leads into. The heraldry across the front is a Tudor political statement in stone.
The gilded bronze figure of Christ above the arch is modern — installed in 1990. The original was shot down by Puritan soldiers in 1643, and the niche stood empty for three and a half centuries. The lower third of the gatehouse has just come out of a five-year conservation programme, so it is cleaner than most photographs of it.
The nave, and Bell Harry above it
The nave is Henry Yevele's, begun in 1377 for Archbishop Sudbury and finished around 1405: tall thin piers, an unbroken vertical rush from floor to vault, and almost no ornament. It is Perpendicular Gothic done with total confidence and it is one of the coldest, cleanest interiors in England.
Stand in the crossing and look straight up into Bell Harry, the central tower, built in the 1490s by John Wastell and rising about 72 metres. The fan vault inside it is the last flourish of English medieval masonry, and there is a hole at its centre through which building material was winched up. Set into the nave floor near the crossing is the Compass Rose, the emblem of the Anglican Communion, laid in 1988: a wind rose with the Greek for “the truth shall make you free” around it, and a mitre at the top pointing north to Canterbury.
The Martyrdom
Up the steps in the north-west transept is the spot. There is an altar, called the Altar of the Sword's Point, and above it a sculpture by Giles Blomfield of 1986: two jagged blades and their shadows, hanging point-down on the wall, red-tipped. It is the least literal war memorial you will ever see and by far the most effective object in the building.
What happened here is worth knowing precisely, because the sculpture assumes you do. The knights demanded Becket come with them; he refused and was struck at the head. Edward Grim, a visiting clerk who tried to shield him, had his arm nearly severed. The third blow drove Becket to his knees and the fourth sheared the crown off his skull, breaking the sword on the pavement — hence the altar's name. A clerk then scattered the contents of the wound. Grim wrote it all down. Within hours the townspeople were soaking cloths in the blood.
The crypt
Down from the Martyrdom is the largest Romanesque crypt in England, built around 1100 and almost untouched since. It is low, wide, dim and much older-feeling than anything above it, because it is: this is the surviving fabric of the church Becket knew. His body lay here from 1170 until 1220, and it was here that Henry II did penance and here that most of the miracles were recorded.
Two things to look for. The capitals: dragons, wrestling beasts, a goat playing a harp, some finished, some abandoned half-carved, which tells you the masons stopped mid-job. And the Black Prince's actual funeral armour — helm, gauntlets, shield, scabbard and jupon — now displayed in a case down here rather than over his tomb, where 1950s replicas hang instead.
The crypt is also the one place in the cathedral where photography is banned outright, at all times. Put the phone away before you go down.
The French church in the crypt
In the western crypt, a congregation of Huguenot and Walloon refugees has worshipped since 1576 — granted the space by Elizabeth I after they outgrew St Alphege the year before. They are still there, still meeting every Sunday afternoon, still in French. It is the oldest continuously worshipping refugee congregation in Britain, running in an unbroken line for four hundred and fifty years, and it is signposted from the south side. Almost no visitor knows it exists.
The Great Cloister and the Chapter House
Out on the north side is the cloister, rebuilt in the early fifteenth century with a lierne vault carrying somewhere around eight hundred and fifty carved bosses. Most are heraldic: donors paid for a boss and got their arms on the ceiling, which makes the vault a fundraising record as well as a work of art. Look for the green men and the grotesques mixed in among the shields.
Off it opens the Chapter House, with the largest stone-vaulted wagon roof in England over a room where one of the largest Benedictine communities in the country met every morning to hear a chapter of the Rule read. It has a second life as a film set, and a third as the place T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral was first performed, in 1935, a few yards from where the murder happened.
The pilgrim steps and the Quire
Back inside, the steps up to the Quire and on to the Trinity Chapel are worn into hollows. That is not weathering. That is four centuries of people going up on their knees. Run a hand over the dip in the stone: it is the most direct physical evidence of medieval popular religion anywhere in England.
The Quire above is William of Sens's, and the point where his work meets William the Englishman's is visible if you look at the columns — the marble shafts change and the arches narrow, because the second man was building around a shrine rather than a choir.
The Trinity Chapel, and the candle
This is what the eastern arm was built for. From 1220 to 1538 a gold shrine covered in pilgrims' jewels stood here on a stone base, and the floor around it is worn into a broad shallow basin by the feet of everyone who circled it. Erasmus, who saw it in 1512, said the gold was the least of it and the jewels were beyond counting.
Today there is nothing: a lit candle on the pavement and an empty space. The cathedral has resisted every suggestion of replacing the shrine, and it is right to. The absence is the exhibit, and it is far more affecting than any reconstruction.
The Miracle Windows
Around the chapel are the windows that made it work. Twelve were made around 1200 to show Becket's posthumous miracles; eight survive, and they are among the finest and earliest narrative glass in Europe. They are also, unusually, about ordinary people: a boy who fell in a river, a man cured of leprosy, a woman with dropsy, a knight's household, a plague of the eyes. The names are given. These are documented cases from the monks' own miracle registers, painted at the size of a wall for pilgrims who could not read.
Higher up, in the Corona and the choir clerestory, is the Ancestors of Christ series — made from the 1170s and some of the oldest stained glass in England, with a few panels that may be older than the fire. A fifteen-year conservation programme on the Miracle Windows began in 2017, so expect one or two to be out for treatment.
The Black Prince
On the south side of the Trinity Chapel lies Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III, hero of Crécy and Poitiers, dead in 1376 a year before he would have been king. The gilt copper effigy is one of the best in England: full plate armour, hands together, leopards and lilies on the shield.
Above it hang his “achievements” — helm, crest, gauntlets, shield, scabbard and jupon, the kit carried at his funeral. What hangs there now is a set of copies made in the 1950s. The originals are downstairs in the crypt in a controlled case, because six hundred years of Kentish damp had nearly finished them. Almost every guidebook still describes the things over the tomb as the real ones.
Henry IV
Opposite, in alabaster, Henry IV and his second wife Joan of Navarre — the only English monarch buried at Canterbury rather than Westminster or Windsor. He asked for it, and the usual explanation is that a usurper who had deposed and probably murdered Richard II wanted the protection of England's most powerful saint. In 1832 the tomb was opened to settle a rumour that the body had been thrown overboard on its way from Westminster. It had not; the face was intact and recognisable.
The Corona
At the far east end, a circular chapel called the Corona, or Becket's Crown. It was built for one relic: the piece of skull sheared off by the fourth blow, kept and displayed separately from the rest of him. That reliquary went the way of the shrine in 1538. The chapel now holds the Chair of St Augustine and some of the oldest glass in the building.
The Chair of St Augustine
A plain marble throne, and every Archbishop of Canterbury since the thirteenth century has been enthroned in it. It has nothing whatever to do with Augustine: it is Purbeck marble, made around 1200, four to six centuries after him. The name stuck because the ceremony needs a lineage more than it needs a date. It is the physical continuity of the office rather than a relic, which is a more interesting thing to be.
The Warriors' Chapel and the modern memorials
In the south-west transept is St Michael's Chapel, universally called the Warriors' Chapel: the regimental chapel of the Buffs, the Royal East Kent Regiment, with colours hanging until they rot because that is the tradition, and a book of names turned a page a day. It also holds the tomb of Lady Margaret Holland with two husbands, one either side, in alabaster — a piece of dynastic bookkeeping done in stone.
The cathedral has not stopped adding. The Great South Window above it collapsed in 1978 and was rebuilt; the glass in it now is a mixture of the oldest in the building and the newest. Look for modern memorials among the medieval ones: this is a church that is still burying people, not a museum that stopped in 1538.
The precincts, and what else is inside the wall
The wall around the cathedral encloses a small city of its own, and the ticket lets you walk most of it. The ruins on the north side are the Benedictine monastery: the infirmary arcade, the dormitory undercroft, and the Water Tower with its twelfth-century plumbing. Canterbury's monks had piped running water three hundred years before most of Europe, and a contemporary drawing of the system survives in Cambridge — one of the earliest engineering diagrams in Europe.
The cathedral is also only one third of the UNESCO site, inscribed in 1988. The others are St Martin's Church, which has been in continuous use since before Augustine landed and is the oldest church in the English-speaking world, and the ruins of St Augustine's Abbey. Both are a ten-minute walk east, and both are free or nearly so. Almost nobody makes the walk.
Tickets and tours
Book ahead for speed, not for savings
Online booking is fast-track entry rather than a cheaper ticket — the price is the same either way, and the ticket lasts a year however you buy it. What is worth adding is a guide or the audio guide: the Becket story is the whole point of the building, and the cathedral's own signage assumes you already know it.
Tour and hotel links go to GetYourGuide and Booking.com. This site earns nothing from them at present — they are here because they are the quickest way to check what is actually available.
Don't miss
- The Martyrdom North-west transept, up the steps: an altar and two hanging sword blades marking the exact spot of the murder.
- The worn pilgrim steps Between the nave and the Trinity Chapel, hollowed by four centuries of knees.
- The candle in the Trinity Chapel Where the shrine stood. Nothing else. It is the best decision the cathedral has made.
- The Miracle Windows Eight surviving panels of c.1200 showing named, documented, ordinary people cured — medieval social history at wall size.
- The Black Prince's real armour In the crypt, not over the tomb. What hangs above him is a 1950s copy.
- The crypt capitals Around 1100, some finished, some abandoned mid-carving with the mason's line still on them.
- The French church A Huguenot congregation has worshipped in the western crypt in French every Sunday since 1576.
- The Compass Rose In the nave floor: the emblem of 85 million Anglicans, with the mitre pointing back at the building you are standing in.
Insider tips
Use the year. The ticket is an annual pass whether or not anyone says so. Two shortish visits beat one forced march, and the building is a different place at 10am on a Tuesday from 2pm on a Saturday.
Check the closure list the day before. This is a working cathedral with a full diary, and the crypt, Quire or Chapter House can be shut for hours for a service, a wedding or a university graduation. It is published daily on the cathedral's own site and it will save you the visit you came for.
Sunday is the awkward day: you can be in the precincts from 11.30 but not in the church until 12.30, and last admission is still 4pm. If Sunday is your only option, go for the afternoon and stay for Evensong, which is free, sung by the choir, and the single best way to experience the building.
Bring binoculars or a long lens for the glass. The Miracle Windows repay close reading — the narrative runs panel by panel like a comic strip — and they are a long way up.
Common questions
Why is Canterbury Cathedral so famous?
For the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket, cut down in the north-west transept on the evening of 29 December 1170 by four knights of Henry II. He was canonised fourteen months later and his shrine made Canterbury the greatest pilgrimage destination in northern Europe — the journey Chaucer’s pilgrims are on. The building is also the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and holds some of the oldest stained glass in England.
Is Canterbury Cathedral free to enter?
No. Adult admission is £18 from October to March, £19.50 from April to September, and £21 on July and August weekends. Accompanied under-18s go free, two per paying adult. The one thing worth knowing: every ticket is valid for a year, so a second visit costs nothing.
What happened to Thomas Becket’s shrine?
Henry VIII’s agents destroyed it in September 1538, prising off the gold and jewels and smashing the marble base; the treasure was carted away in two coffers and twenty-six waggon-loads. A proclamation that November declared Becket no longer a saint. What became of his bones has never been established. The Trinity Chapel now marks the site with a single candle burning on the pavement, which is deliberate rather than an oversight.
How long do you need at Canterbury Cathedral?
One to three hours. Allow at least two if you want the crypt and the Trinity Chapel rather than just the nave — and remember the ticket lasts a year, so splitting it across two mornings costs nothing.
Can you take photographs inside Canterbury Cathedral?
Yes, for personal use in most of the building — but not in the crypt, at any time, and not during any service. Tripods need arranging in advance.
Is anything likely to be closed when I visit?
Quite possibly. The cathedral is a working church and closes the crypt, Quire, Chapter House or nave for hours at a time for services, weddings and graduations; it publishes a rolling day-by-day closure list on its own site. Check it the day before rather than on the morning.
Where to stay and eat nearby
Canterbury is small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes, so anywhere inside the city walls puts the cathedral on your doorstep. The streets immediately around Christ Church Gate are the most touristed and the least interesting to eat in; walk down toward the Westgate or out along Northgate for better value. Staying overnight is worth it for one reason: the precincts at dusk, after the day visitors have gone, with the floodlights on Bell Harry.
More English cathedrals
- Lincoln Cathedral — the Angel Choir, the Imp, and a spire that was once reputedly the tallest thing on Earth.
- York Minster — the seat of the other English archbishop, and the largest expanse of medieval glass in the country.
- Winchester Cathedral — the longest medieval nave in Europe, and a diver who saved it.