Canterbury tales
England’s original staycation location
ITHOUGHT I knew Kent — everyone has their go-to day trips and my family’s favourite is Whitstable. At least once a year we drive down for a fabulous fishy lunch at the Whitstable Oyster Company (which has a menu way beyond just oysters, thankfully), a walk along the front and then a drive to Broadstairs for crazy golf and an ice cream at Morelli’s.
It’s the perfect day out, so we’ve never ventured much further, although sometimes we make it to Margate, for a look around the Turner Art Gallery. But 2021 is the year of the staycation, so when an opportunity arose to stay for a few days and explore a wider area of Kent I jumped at it. And my first discovery was that all those hours we’d spent driving down the M2, all those traffic jams at the Blackwall Tunnel, were pretty unnecessary. There’s a fast train link that whisks you from St Pancras to Canterbury in less than an hour.
Canterbury is, of course, the location for the original staycation — and could even be said to have invented the UK’s travel business — as the ultimate destination of Christian pilgrims who travelled to the cathedral, which has a history stretching back to 597CE. And you absolutely do not have to be Christian to appreciate the building’s grandeur and beauty, its glorious stained glass windows and peaceful cloisters, and its long, fascinating history including the murder of Thomas Becket, the archbishop who enraged Henry II, and who was hacked to death by four of the king’s knights in the cathedral itself.
As you wander the cobbled streets, it’s quite easy to imagine yourself back in the medieval city of Canterbury — which is quite extraordinary when you consider that Kent was at the forefront of the Nazi aerial bombing campaign, the cathedral was a particular target, and the city was one picked out in 1942 for ‘Baedecker raids’ on cultural cities, identified from the Baedeker tourist guidebooks, as a reprisal for the bombing by the Allies of the German cities of Lübeck and Cologne.
The eastern part of the High Street was reduced to rubble and many people were killed, but the cathedral was unscathed, thanks to a team of firewatchers who patrolled the roof and disposed of the incendiary bombs as they landed.
You can learn about this — and other aspects of Canterbury’s fascinating history — from Sam, the young founder of CT Tours, which takes groups around the city explaining its history, including the literary links with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, and — of particular interest to JC readers — the city’s Jewish community.
In medieval times Canterbury was home to a thriving Jewish community, traders in corn and grain. One, Jacob the Jew appears in the records as the owner of a great stone house, built around 1190. Behind his house lay the site of the medieval synagogue. This is now the site of Canterbury’s new Abode hotel, where I stayed, a modern, bright comfortable hotel in an old building, and although nothing now remains from Jacob’s time, it was still good to make that connection as I enjoyed my delicious scrambled eggs and smoked salmon for breakfast and thought about the Jews who ate there hundreds of years before.
Around the corner is Jewry Street, another reminder of the city’s history and in King Street, set back, is a more modern remnant of Canterbury’s nineteenth century Jewish community. Its Old Synagogue,
an extraordinary building, fronted by Egyptian style columns, was designed by local non-Jewish architect Hezekiel Marshall who avoided the more common gothic style because the community thought “our every tradition associates it with recollections of persecution”.
Why this led them to pick the style of the Egyptians is not clear — although there was a vogue for Egypt at the time. Next door to the synagogue is the mikveh. The building is now owned by King’s School and used as a music room. There’s also an old Jewish cemetery on the Whitstable Road.
What else can you do in Canterbury? We were treated to a tour of a brewery — The Foundry — where 16 types of ale are made. Then, after a delicious lunch at the Café Soleil which occupies a former 18th century wool store by the river Stour, we took to the river itself, for a boat trip. A replica ducking stool is a reminder of a grim part of the city’s history: here, women accused of witchcraft were subjected to water torture, as recently as 1809. Their stories — and many others — were recounted with relish on a ghost tour later that evening, run by local institution John Hippisley. In fact, Canterbury boasts so many ghosts that 40 minutes into the tour we had only moved a few yards, criss-crossing one street — but each tale opened a window into another world. Most fascinating were the carvings on the doors of the city’s branch of Pret a Manger: a horned devil with cloven hooves, dating back to the fourteenth century and easily missed.
Canterbury boasts many restaurants and pubs, including The Parrot, built on Roman foundations in the fourteenth century when the cathedral was under construction. There’s a garden if you prefer to eat and drink outside, but under its beams you can almost imag
ine yourself back in the days of the medieval pilgrims who once stayed here.
We headed for Whitstable on day two and took a trip out into the sea on a vintage lifeboat, before stopping to admire the restoration work on a 19th century oyster yawl, the Gamecock, a ship that’s a source of much local pride and fund-raising.
After a stroll along the front, and a browse around the pretty independent shops of Harbour Street (something I’d missed in all my trips here), we had lunch at JoJos, just outside town, where the vegetarian mezze is perfect for sharing, and the fish — try the char-grilled mackerel with capers — is sublime.
A short drive along the coast is Reculver, once the site of a Roman fort. Now much has been lost to coastal erosion, but the impressive ruins of a medieval church and its cemetery are still there. Between the two lies Herne Bay, where an oldfashioned pier has a carousel at the end, and the ice-cream from Makcaris is unmissable.
We made candles in oyster shells in the workshop at the back of artist Jo Oakley’s gallery/shop and, as I picked the essential oils to blend, I considered informing my husband that we were selling up and moving south, so I could start a new career doing something arty by the sea. Basking in the sunshine of a heatwave, the coast felt positively Mediterranean.
Visiting a vineyard the next morning, owned by the Simpsons Wine Estate which offers tours and tastings, it was equally easy to imagine we were in the Loire valley. The nearby village of Barham was as pretty as any in the Cotswolds, with every garden bursting with roses and hollyhocks.
Back home, I’m already planning my next trip to Kent. But this time we’ll go by train — and I don’t think a day trip will be anything near enough.