The Cathedral and Metropolitical Church of Christ at Canterbury is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. It’s part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with St Augustine’s Abbey and St Martin’s Church.
It’s one of the most important churches in the United Kingdom for its historic and spiritual significance and is a must-visit if you enjoy ecclesiastical architecture.
I first visited in October 2020, when I arrived on foot at the end of the Pilgrims’ Way and much of the cathedral was under scaffolding. I went back in August 2025 to see it restored, so this article has photos from both visits. You can find information about visiting at www.canterbury-cathedral.org.
The cathedral features in my travel memoir, Pilgrimage, and it inspired the opening scene of my ARKANE thriller, Tomb of Relics.
Watch a short video tour of the cathedral, with photos from both visits (4 minutes):
St Augustine founded the cathedral in 597 AD. After the Norman Conquest, Archbishop Lanfranc rebuilt it between 1070 and 1077.
On 29 December 1170, four knights murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket inside his own cathedral. He was made a saint in 1173, just three years after his death, and pilgrims came to his shrine from all over Europe.
A terrible fire in 1174 destroyed the quire. A French master mason, William of Sens, began to rebuild it in the new Gothic style.
Before the Reformation, the cathedral was also the church of a Benedictine monastery, Christ Church, Canterbury, which was dissolved in 1540.
When I visited in October 2020, the exterior and parts of the interior were under restoration as part of The Canterbury Journey. The £34.5 million project repaired the roofs and stonework of the nave and west towers, restored Christ Church Gate and built a new visitor centre. The last of the work finished in November 2022.
On the one hand, it was a shame to see so much of the cathedral covered in scaffolding and protective boards, but it’s also fascinating to see it during a historic restoration.
If the building is not maintained, it won’t last hundreds more years. It was humbling to stand in front of a building that has been here for almost a thousand years and know that the work going on now will be seen by so many generations to come in the future.
I also enjoyed seeing the new statues of the Queen and Prince Philip. The stone was paler than the other sculptures of historic monarchs, and the features weren’t yet weathered. Both were still alive then, and now they are both gone.
When I came back in August 2025, the scaffolding had gone. Behind me is the Great South Window of the south-west transept.
After a stone fell in 2009, the whole window was taken down. Masons carved around 100 new stones before it went back in 2016, in a separate project funded by the Cathedral Trust. Its glass includes the twelfth-century Ancestors of Christ.
I love Gothic cathedrals and the nave is always the most spectacular. In 2020, it was covered in protective shielding, but this time I could finally see it properly.
The nave was rebuilt between 1377 and 1405 in the Perpendicular style, the last phase of English Gothic, with its tall, straight lines. Henry Yevele seems to have been the master mason.
Memorials line the walls of the aisles, under the tall windows.
Whichever way you walk, remember to look up!
At the east end of the nave, the openwork stone arch across the crossing is a strainer arch. The master mason John Wastell put them in, as Pevsner puts it, “to help the crossing piers carry the weight of his tower.”
Turn around to face the Great West Window, completed in 1405. Some of the glass is older than the window. One panel shows Adam digging, from around 1178, and the cathedral says it “is believed to be the earliest representation of gardening in English art.”
The pulpitum screen, built around 1450, divides the nave from the quire. Its six crowned figures are usually read as kings, including Ethelbert holding a model of the cathedral, although recent research suggests that one of them may be Queen Bertha.
In my ARKANE thriller, Tomb of Relics, Morgan Sierra stops to look at this screen on the morning a relic of Thomas Becket goes missing from the cathedral.
Looking up to the fan vault of Bell Harry Tower over the crossing. John Wastell built the tower in the 1490s, and the vault was finished in the early 1500s. The tower takes its name from a small bell called Bell Harry, which was hung there in the fifteenth century.
The Compass Rose on the floor of the nave is a symbol of the worldwide Anglican Communion. It points to the east end of the cathedral, not north. The text reads ‘The truth will set you free’ in Greek, the language of the New Testament.
Ornate wooden pulpit, erected in 1898 and carved by the architect George Bodley. The main panels include carvings of the crucifixion and annunciation.
The western crypt under the quire was built around 1100 and features Romanesque carvings.
The Jesus Chapel, off the Eastern crypt. The letters M and I are the Latin initials for Mary and Jesus.
St Michael’s Chapel is also known as the Warriors’ Chapel, or the Buffs’ Chapel, after the Royal East Kent Regiment. Their regimental colours hang on each side.
Since 1926, a page of the Book of Life, which holds the names of Buffs who gave their lives, has been turned at 11am. The tomb of Archbishop Stephen Langton sits under the chapel wall, and only the head end of it is inside the chapel.
The Martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket, murdered on this site on 29 December 1170 by four knights of King Henry II. He was canonised on 21 February 1173 and his tomb became a popular pilgrimage site until the Reformation.
In the chapel to the left of the martyrdom site, look right as you enter. The tomb is covered in carved skulls and bones, and it belongs to Dean Charles Fotherby, who died in 1619. Pevsner describes it as “a charnel-house array of skulls and bones.”
The first tomb of St Thomas Becket was destroyed during the Reformation. A sculpture now hangs above its position. Transport by Antony Gormley, a male figure made from old iron nails from the transept roof. Gormley said of the sculpture, “We are all the temporary inhabitants of a body. It is our house, instrument and medium. Through it, all impressions of the world come and from it all our acts, thoughts and feelings are communicated.” [BBC]
Cadaver monument of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury (died 1443), Canterbury Cathedral. He had this built while he was alive, a reminder that whoever we are, we all end up in the tomb. Memento mori, indeed.
The quire, where the daily services are held, was rebuilt between 1175 and 1184, after the fire.
When I visited in August 2025, a 16-metre hand-woven textile hung near the Trinity Chapel. Moon landing, by Margo Selby with the composer Helen Caddick, celebrates the little-known women who wove the computer circuits and memory for the 1969 moon landing. Its stripes follow the rhythm of Caddick’s music.
Trinity Chapel, where a candle burns on the site of Becket’s shrine. His remains were moved here in 1220, and Henry VIII had the shrine destroyed in 1538.
Outside on the south side, the large window of St Anselm’s Chapel was set into the Norman walls in 1336. Prior Oxenden’s accounts say it cost £42, “all given by himself and his friends.”
The Cloisters. The cathedral was originally the church of the Benedictine priory of Christ Church.
Looking out of the cloisters towards the quadrangle.
Look up at the vault of the Great Cloister, rebuilt under Prior Chillenden around 1400. According to the cathedral, it is “adorned with over 800 architectural shields, which represent important families and donors.”
The Chapter House is the largest in England, and it was where the monks met to discuss the business of the monastery. The timber wagon roof of Irish oak dates from around 1400 and was restored in the Victorian era.
The east window, from 1896, has 21 figures from Canterbury’s history, from Queen Bertha and St Augustine to Queen Victoria.
Walk round to the north-east of the cathedral to find the ruins of the monks’ infirmary. The round Norman arches date from the very beginning of the twelfth century. The cathedral’s own history says, “After the Reformation the infirmary was converted into houses but by the later 19th century had fallen into disrepair.”
The ruined arch of the infirmary chapel frames Bell Harry Tower.
Nearby is the Water Tower, built around 1160 by Prior Wibert. The monks washed their hands here on the way to the cathedral.
A plan of the monastery’s waterworks from the 1160s, colour-coded for the pipes and drains, survives in the Eadwine Psalter at Trinity College, Cambridge.
The ground floor is the original Norman undercroft, with open arches on carved columns. The basin where the monks washed was on the floor above, and it had eight spouts.
Just outside the precincts, you can also explore the ruins of St Augustine’s Abbey, part of the same World Heritage Site.
If you stand at the ruins and look back at the cathedral, there is a window on your right with some … unusual … carvings for a religious area!
Nearby, the Canterbury War Horse, in memory of the 8 million horses that died during the First World War.
The door to the Cathedral precinct was also shrouded for conservation in 2020. Its stonework, colour and heraldry were restored as part of The Canterbury Journey. If you stay within the grounds, you have to ring the bell here to get back in. It’s guarded by the special Cathedral Constables (police).
It was wonderful to go back to Canterbury Cathedral and see it without the scaffolding. Well worth a visit, whether you arrive on foot as a pilgrim or not!
Accommodation
You can stay within the grounds at the Canterbury Cathedral Lodge, which I highly recommend. It’s quite atmospheric walking around the grounds at night, and you have access to visit the cathedral and attend services. I went to sung Evensong on arriving at the end of my pilgrimage and it was magical.
Books featuring Canterbury Cathedral
Probably the most famous is The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, which follows a group of pilgrims from Southwark Cathedral in London to Canterbury. There are many translations from the Middle English.
Sacrilege by SJ Parris. Historical crime. London,1584: Radical philosopher, ex-monk, and spy Giordano Bruno suspects he is being followed by an old enemy … In the city that was once England’s greatest center of pilgrimage, Bruno uncovers a more dangerous plot in the making, one that forces him to turn his detective’s eye to the strange case of Saint Thomas Becket, a twelfth-century cardinal of Canterbury Cathedral whose mysterious murder is only matched by the legend surrounding the disappearance of his body.
Murder in the Cathedral by TS Eliot. The Archbishop Thomas Becket speaks fatal words before he is martyred in T. S. Eliot’s best-known drama, based on the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170. Praised for its poetically masterful handling of issues of faith, politics, and the common good, T. S. Eliot’s play bolstered his reputation as the most significant poet of his time.
Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel by John Guy. This is the man, not the legend … A lively and enlightening new book that brings a colossal figure of British history vividly to life.
Pilgrimage by J.F. Penn. My memoir of three pilgrimages, starting with the Pilgrims’ Way from Southwark Cathedral to Canterbury in October 2020, which ended with Evensong in this cathedral.
Bell Harry by Nicholas Best. In 1179, King Louis VII of France came to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket. He brought a gift with him: a magnificent, blood-red ruby. For hundreds of years the ruby, the Régale de France, held pride of place in Canterbury Cathedral. But, during the reign of Henry VIII, the ruby vanished. In 1942, a German bombing raid hit Canterbury, revealing a hidden tunnel leading straight towards the cathedral. When three young American soldiers decided to investigate, they had no idea what they would find. Will they solve a mystery spanning hundreds of years and locate the Régale de France?
Ex morte vita. From death comes life.
When a relic of St Thomas Becket is stolen from Canterbury Cathedral, England, ARKANE agents Morgan Sierra and Jake Timber are called in to find it. As the trail of missing relics leads them across sacred sites in Europe, Morgan and Jake discover something far more sinister lies beneath…
Check out Tomb of Relics, An ARKANE thriller.
And a short video on the real places behind Tomb of Relics, from Becket’s Canterbury to Kraków and Cologne Cathedral (3 minutes):
