Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
A swansong before bulldozers moved in
Just before the redevelopment of Canterbury’s blitzed south-east quadrant began, the Canterbury Festival Exhibition was set up and held on to part of the devastated Whitefriars site.
Opened on June 11, 1951, the exhibition site took up most of the south side of St George’s Street and stretched back onto the then Simon Langton Boys’ School grounds.
The first of the above photos, left, shows part of the exhibition site, probably on the day before opening.
In the foreground is the Becket Sculpture, with two plastered hands symbolising the eternal struggle between church and state.
One hand supports a model of Lanfranc’s Cathedral while the other holds a sword aloft.
Moving along, we see the monastic herb garden in front of an old flint wall which contained some in-situ medieval material from the Friary.
In the background is the Civic Pavilion; one of a number to be discovered across the exhibition site.
The exhibition closed on September 12 and, almost immediately, nearly everything was bulldozed prior to the redevelopment of St. George’s Street. The only survivor was another stretch of surviving friary wall, featured on these pages a few weeks ago.
The second photo, right, dates from 1997 and was taken at exactly the same location. Left is the back of the Ricemans store, completed in September 1962, and to the right is the Ricemans extension – part of the 1973 Whitefriars Shopping Development. Both buildings were demolished in 2003 for the current Whitefriars scheme.