Canterbury - A Beautiful, Easy Day Trip from London

Planning a London itinerary? Discover why Canterbury is one of the best and easiest day trips from London.

Just 55 minutes by high-speed train from St Pancras, this UNESCO World Heritage city packs 2,000 years of history into a walkable afternoon. Explore the magnificent Canterbury Cathedral, follow the footsteps of Chaucer's pilgrims, see Roman ruins, visit England's oldest parish church, wander medieval streets, enjoy a traditional English afternoon tea, and have lunch in one of the country's oldest pubs. 

From hidden gardens and riverside walks to Shakespeare-era history and fascinating WWII stories, this episode gives you the perfect self-guided Canterbury itinerary - helping you make the most of a memorable day beyond London before you're back in the city for dinner. 

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Hey savvy listeners, this is Expat Andy, your host and producer of Publicity, your London Travel Toolkit, the most unique London travel show available. You're loving this show, right? So you might be shocked to know that the majority of your family, friends, neighbours, and colleagues have never heard of it. I know! Insert Gasp. Clutch your pearls, right? At this very moment, someone you know, like, maybe even love, is struggling to plan a London trip with no idea that this treasure vault of help is available to them. Free of charge. Do yourself and them a solid, share this show with your network. In doing so, you'll help travel and hospitality businesses across London, and you'll make yourself look cool in the process. Thank you and enjoy this episode. Oh, and of course, share it. 55 minutes east of London St. Pancras Station, our train slows into a city pivotal to the history of England. Not a museum piece, a working cathedral city that has been meeting travellers off the London Road for two thousand years. Romans, Saxons, a murdered archbishop, a million pilgrims, and now us. This is daybreak. Today we're going to Canterbury, one of the great day trips from London, walked in order from the Romans to the Blitz with a proper pub lunch in the middle. Here's the move. From St. Pancras International, the high speed Southeastern Service drops us at Canterbury West in about fifty five minutes. Faster than some Londoners commutes. There are slower trains from Charing Cross and Victoria, but if you want the London to Canterbury train done right, the high speed line is your choice. You step off at Canterbury West already on the historic approach, the old road in from London. Everything today is on foot, flat, and easy to do in one afternoon. One city, one cathedral, 1,500 years of things to do in Canterbury, and we're going to take them all in order. Cross into the old town through the Grade 1 listed scheduled monument West Gate, the 60 foot stone gatehouse Straddin the Road. It's the largest surviving medieval city gate in England, and the last of the city's seven gates. It guards the road that has run to London since antiquity. Walk under it, and you're on the spine of Roman Duravernum Cantiacorum, a walled town the Romans planted soon after the invasion of AD forty three, on the road between Londinium and the Channel Ports. You can't see it from the streets, so go under it. The Roman Museum on Butchery Lane is built around an actual Roman townhouse and its mosaic floor, uncovered when wartime bombing tore the city open. Two thousand years, one pavement. Before our walk-in starts in earnest, let's take a quick tea break. Tiny Tim's Tea Room does the proper English tea room thing with 30 odd teas and coffees. Walk to the eastern edge, just beyond the walls, and you reach the actual birthplace of English Christianity. In the 580s, a Frankish princess named Bertha was already worshipping in a small Roman-walled church here, the Grade One Listed Saint Martin's, which is still standing, still holding services, and recognized by UNESCO as the oldest parish church in the English speaking world still in continuous use. In 597 a monk named Augustine arrived from Rome on the Pope's orders. He used Bertha's chapel as his base and converted her pagan husband, King Aethelbert. A year later, he founded Saint Augustine's Abbey, a burial place of the Saxon Kings of Kent and the first archbishops. Now a romantic ruin you can walk. These two sites, plus the cathedral, make up Canterbury's UNESCO World Heritage Site. Back to the center and the Grade One listed Canterbury Cathedral, Cane Stone, a Norman crypt, and the Bell Harry Tower of Brick faced with stone finished around 1498. On the 29th of December 1170, four of Henry II's knights cut down Archbishop Thomas Becket inside his own cathedral. He was canonized within three years, and the spot, the martyrdom, turned Canterbury into the pilgrimage capital of medieval England. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales runs on exactly this pilgrimage. He sets his travellers off from the Tabard Inn in Southwark, the London end of the very road we rode in on, bound for Becket's Shrine. To pass the miles, their host sets a contest. Each pilgrim tells two tales on the way down and two on the way home, and whoever spins the best yarn gets his supper paid for by the rest. It's the London to Canterbury Run, six centuries before we made it. And those pilgrims, they needed a bed for the night. Right on the high street where it crosses the Stour at the King's Bridge, sits the Grade One listed East Bridge Hospital, founded in the 1180s as a hostel for poor pilgrims on their way to Becket's Shrine. Hospital here is the old meaning, hospitality rather than medicine. A vaulted undercroft where pilgrims bedded down, a refectory with a thirteenth century wall painting and a chapel up top. The building closed to visitors in 2025 and is now on Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register. Said to be Canterbury's oldest pub, built around 1370 on Roman foundations as the Grade 2 star listed St. Radigan's Hall. With its rough beams, low ceilings, and log fires, it's the Hollywood ideal and the real deal of the idea of an English pub. The menu looks amazing, as do the many food photographs posted online by hungry travelers. So eat, you've done the Romans, the Saxons, and the medieval pilgrimage. Refuel before the Tudors. A city built on pilgrimage nearly went under, but waves of Huguenot and Walloon weavers, Protestants fleeing persecution in France and the Low Countries, settled here and rebuilt the economy on cloth. You can still see their world in the grade two star listed, lean in half-timbered old weaver's house over the river Stour. The same generation produced Christopher Marlowe, baptised at St. George the Martyr Church in 1564, a shoemaker's son and king's school scholar who all but invented English dramatic blank verse and was the foremost playwright in London before Shakespeare overtook him. The church was heavily damaged during World War II bombing in 1942. Its remains are Grade II listed. The modern theatre by the river still carries Marlowe's name. Check out the Grade 2 listed memorial to Marlowe next to the theatre. And also beside the theatre, Don't Walk Past Bulkhead, a giant steel face by Kent sculptor Rick Kirby. It plays on Marlowe's own line for Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships. And Kirby welded it together from scrap hauled off of boats broken up along the Kent coast. A thousand ships, more or less. When your feet protest, Canterbury offers lovely gardens. Right off the high street, the Franciscan Gardens, on the scheduled monument site of a former Franciscan friary. In the grounds is Greyfriars Chapel, the surviving building of the first Franciscan friary in England, founded in 1224 and straddling this tower on two stone arches. Down by the city wall, the Grade 2 listed Dane John Gardens are a layer cake of the whole story. The scheduled monument, early defensive mound, with the Grade 2 listed Dane John Mound, Pinnacle Monument. Roman burial site repiled into a Norman castle motte to the Georgian Pleasure Park you can climb today for the view. And by the West Gate, the riverside West Gate Gardens give you willows, the stower, and, if you are feeling it, a punt. Canterbury's night came on the first of June. Forty-three people killed and around 800 buildings destroyed. The cathedral should have burned, but four fire watchers stayed on the roof through the raid, putting out fires from incendiary bombs before they could catch. The same raid destroyed a fifth of the old city, and the cleared ground let archaeologists uncover the Roman town, Dura Vernum, before rebuilding buried it again. From here it's a short walk back to Canterbury West Station and the fast train back to London. If you fancy a cheeky pint before the train, then the Foundry Brew Pub at 77 Stour Street, Canterbury CT1, 2NR brews and distills everything on site. 16 plus ales under one roof. We've enjoyed Canterbury in an afternoon. Romans under our feet, the cradle of English Christianity at the edge of town, a murder at the cathedral, a pub older than many countries, and a skyline that survived the blitz. We rode out on the high speed line, walked fifteen centuries in order, and will be back in London for dinner. That's the whole trick of daybreak, a proper day away from the holiday inside the holiday. If you live, work or travel in London, or if you own, manage or work in a London pub, if you work as a London tour guide or at a London attraction, and you'd like to be a guest contributor to our main podcast, Publicity, your London Travel Toolkit, email me expatandy at publicithepodcast.com. Love our content? Love London and its pubs? The best thing you can do is share the love. Literally, share this episode with your network. Your share is the butterfly ripple effect across the globe for a small business in London.