Shrine, pilgrims and walls: how Canterbury became a cathedral city

Canterbury grew up on the banks of the Great Stour. When the Romans took the area in the first century AD they built their own town over an earlier British settlement and called it Durovernum Cantiacorum.

Late in the third century, probably between 270 and 290, the town was closed in by an earth bank and a stone wall pierced by seven gates. The circuit took in about 130 acres (53 hectares). Little Roman masonry can be seen above ground now, but that ring is the reason the city still has a clear edge: the walls were rebuilt on it in the Middle Ages, and the modern ring road follows them.

By the late sixth century Kent was ruled by Æthelberht, one of the most powerful kings in England. His wife Bertha was a Christian princess from the Frankish kingdoms across the Channel, and she worshipped in St Martin's, a small church outside the city that had become her private chapel. It is still in use today, and is described as the oldest parish church in England in continuous use.

In 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent a monk named Augustine to the English. He landed in Kent that year, won the king's support and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, making the city the centre of his see. Æthelberht granted the missionaries land outside the walls, and there, probably in 598, an abbey was founded. The kings of Kent were buried in its church.

Four centuries later, in 978, Archbishop Dunstan, a reformer of monastic life, added Augustine's name to the abbey's dedication. Today St Augustine's Abbey, St Martin's and the cathedral make up a single World Heritage Site.

Between 1155 and 1161 Henry II gave the city its first charter. A few years later his quarrel with his archbishop, Thomas Becket, ended in violence: on 29 December 1170 Becket was murdered inside his own cathedral. Pope Alexander III declared him a saint in 1173, and on 12 July 1174 the king himself did public penance at the tomb.

Becket's body lay in a tomb in the crypt for fifty years. On 7 July 1220 his remains were carried up to a splendid new shrine in the Trinity Chapel, which had been built to receive them. The cathedral's own archives say the cult attracted countless thousands of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages.

Travellers from London came in through Harbledown, just west of the city, where Archbishop Lanfranc had founded the hospital of St Nicholas for lepers in the late eleventh century. Geoffrey Chaucer, writing The Canterbury Tales between 1387 and 1400, set his storytellers on that same journey to Becket's shrine; Harbledown is thought to be the place he calls Bobbe-up-and-doun.

In 1378 Richard II granted five years of murage, a toll raised to pay for town walls, and further grants followed until a last one in 1402. The rebuilding took about thirty years. The new walls had gunports, and they were defended by some of the first batteries of guns in England.

The grandest survivor is the Westgate. Built of Kentish ragstone around 1379, it was rebuilt by Archbishop Simon Sudbury before his death in 1381, and at 60 feet (18 metres) high it is the largest surviving city gate in England. It served as the city's prison from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, became a museum in 1906, and road traffic still squeezes between its two drum towers.

In 1448 a new royal charter gave Canterbury a mayor. The other gates did not last as well as the Westgate: all of them were pulled down in the late eighteenth century. Between 1790 and 1803 James Simmons laid out the Dane John Gardens in the south-east corner of the walls. Over half of the medieval circuit still stands, and 17 of its 24 towers remain.

The Reformation ended the pilgrim trade almost overnight. Becket's shrine was destroyed on Henry VIII's orders in 1538, and on 30 July of the same year the monks of St Augustine's, led by Abbot John Essex, surrendered their abbey to the Crown. From 1539 the abbot's lodgings were turned into a royal palace, and in 1541 the king ordered the great church demolished.

Christopher Marlowe, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, was baptised at St George's Church on 26 February 1564. He won a scholarship to The King's School before going up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became one of the leading playwrights of the Elizabethan stage. The city's main theatre carries his name.

Persecution in northern Europe sent Protestant refugees across the Channel, and many of them, known as Walloons and Huguenots, settled in Canterbury, where they were offered the western crypt of the cathedral for worship. They brought silk weaving, which overtook the older wool trade by 1676, and by the seventeenth century French-speaking families made up around two-fifths of the population. When the congregation shrank in the 1880s it moved into the Black Prince's chantry, still known as the Huguenot chapel, where services are held in French every Sunday afternoon.

On 3 May 1830 the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway opened, with George Stephenson as engineer and a locomotive called Invicta. It was one of the earliest passenger railways to use steam, and in 1834 it issued what is said to be the world's first season ticket. The South Eastern Railway reached the city on 6 February 1846, at the station now called Canterbury West, and another station opened south of the centre on 9 July 1860; it was renamed Canterbury East in 1889.

The worst night of the Second World War came in the early hours of 1 June 1942, during the raids the Luftwaffe aimed at historic towns. About 3,600 fire bombs and some 130 high-explosive bombs fell. A team of four fire-watchers on the cathedral roofs threw incendiaries off the building, and the cathedral survived, although its Victorian library and other buildings nearby were destroyed.

In the decades after the war the city gained a ring road, its route shaped by the line of the walls. In 1962 the Church of England founded a teacher training college here, which became Canterbury Christ Church University in 2005 and now occupies ground beside St Augustine's Abbey. In 1988 UNESCO added the cathedral, the abbey and St Martin's Church to the World Heritage List.