Canterbury, England has been the stage for many dramatic scenes throughout history. One of the first Christian missionaries brought faith to the people of the city in the 11th century. The national church was founded in that place, and later another famous Christian was brutally martyred at the order of the Crown.

Since that time, every year thousands upon thousands of tourists and pilgrims visit the city to breathe in its historical significance, view its magnificent architecture, and pay their respects at the tombs of the faithful. See if you recognise any of these scenes.

Early Christians

Augustine was sent on mission from Pope Gregory the Great to convert the King of Kent to Christianity. Arriving in Canterbury at the end of the 6th century, he found some success with both the King and the locals. Subsequently he became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

Early into the 7th century he began work on one of England’s oldest and most treasured buildings: Canterbury Cathedral.

The Cathedral sat as the Pope’s eyes and ears in England until the 16th century when Henry VIII broke away from Rome and the Church of England was founded. Today, Canterbury Cathedral is the seat of power for the national church.

Death in the Cathedral

The city and cathedral have played a major role in literature as well. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s beloved work, The Canterbury Tales, a group of pious (and some not so pious) pilgrims set out from London to make their way to the Cathedral to pay their respects to St. Thomas Becket – whose remains were once entombed within its grounds.

Though a fictionalised account, Becket himself was a real archbishop who was murdered in 1170 at the order of Henry II who disagreed with him over the church’s rights. There are many stained glassed windows, as well as other monuments, paying homage to the martyr. Archbishop Becket’s body was buried in a tomb within the cathedral, though his bones were later destroyed – also by order of the king.

Most other Archbishops, however, are buried in St. Augustine’s Abbey, just east of the cathedral’s grounds.

Though it was originally named the Abbey of St. Peter and Paul, it was later renamed to reflect St. Augustine himself. You can see from the satellite photos that most of the abbey’s walls and structures have long since worn away or have been destroyed.

The Oldest School in England

Standing at the edge of the abbey, is another remarkable building – which is believed to be the oldest school in England.

The King’s school has been educating the next generation for just over 1400 years. It was founded on the same grounds as St. Augustine’s Abbey in the 6th century by Augustine himself. Many of the school’s classes, with its 800-odd pupils, are taught within the ancient buildings of the Abbey.

An Unrelated Castle

The last of Canterbury’s great historical buildings shown here isn’t really related to any of the others mentioned, but it makes it into this post of the basis that it is also old and pretty cool looking!

Canterbury Castle was of the three original castles built in this area. The present stone structure replaced a wooden castle from 1066. The newer one was built after the Battle of Hastings and used to guard the important route taken by William the Conquerer.

Kind of in the spirit of the Darwin Awards, someone leased the castle to a gas company in the 19th century. The building (because it was filled with gas most likely) caught fire and the top floor was destroyed. The city planners must have a sense of humour as the Castle sits at the crossroads of Castle Street and Gas Street.

The city of Canterbury is quaint and lovely, steeped in history and an enormous success with tourists. In fact, we’ve only barely uncovered some of the city’s treasures. What is your favourite spot in Canterbury?

High on green hillsides overlooking the village of Fovant in Wiltshire, a dozen giant logos – some more than 50 metres across – can be seen carved into the chalk.

These designs date back to the first world war, when Fovant and the surrounding villages housed a transit camp for troops en route to and from the battlefields of the Western Front in France. In memory of fallen colleagues (and, no doubt, simply as a huge “Kilroy Was Here“), soldiers from various regiments painstakingly created representations of their cap badges.

Originally, there were many more badges, but nobody is quite sure how many have since faded away beneath the grass. Today, 12 remain, of which eight have been “adopted” for preservation by the Fovant Badges Society (due to lack of funds, four of them will not be saved).

The largest group of badges – nine of them – can be found on Fovant Down (they appear upside down on the aerial photos as they are carved on a north-facing hillside). They represent:

1. The Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry. 2. The YMCA (which was an important provider of welfare services in the transit camps).

3. 6th Battalion, The City of London Regiment. 4. The Australian Imperial Force badge (the “Rising Sun”).

5. The Royal Corps of Signals. 6. The Wiltshire Regiment.

7. The London Rifle Brigade. 8. The Post Office Rifles.

9. The Devonshire Regiment.

All these (with the exception of the YMCA) will be preserved.

Further badges, which sadly will be left to fade away, can be seen on nearby Compton Down and Sutton Down:

10. An enormous map of Australia, carved by unknown soldiers from Down Under. 11. The Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

12. 7th Battalion, City of London Regiment.

Although the transit camps are long gone, there are still signs of a military presence in the area. The excellent Secret Bases website reveals that these mysterious shapes among the trees are the Fovant Wood Ordnance Depot, a munitions storage area for the nearby RAF base at Chilmark. That base closed down in the mid-1990s, although rumour has it that top secret goings-on still occur in and around the disused quarries…

Read more at the Fovant Badges Society website.

The humble red telephone kiosk is a much loved British icon, thanks to a long history on the streets of the United Kingdom. Today there are a fraction of the number there once were, but they are still a common enough sight that we can find some interesting ones to visit.

K2 model telephone boxes behind Enzo Plazzotta’s bronze, “Young Dancer”, on Broad Street, Covent Garden, London

The first recognisably “modern” red phone box was designed for a competition that the General Post Office held in 1924 to find a kiosk deemed acceptable to those London Boroughs that had refused to allow the erection of the previous K1 kiosks.

The winning entry, the K2, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott¹ and from 1926 was erected all over London. Scott had suggested they be built from steel and painted silver, but the Post Office decided to make the K2 in cast iron, and to paint it red.

K2 at Carfax Tower, Oxford

In 1929 the K3 was introduced, and although it was again designed by Gilbert Scott, this time they were painted cream. Like the K2 they were too expensive for widespread deployment, meaning that very few survive today, and as far as I can tell, there are none on street view. Instead here’s a picture of the only surviving K3 in Scotland.

The K4 model was designed by the Post Office, which isn’t surprising when you learn it had a post box and a stamp machine stuck on the back. Apparently phone users complained about the noise from the stamp machines so only 50 were ever made, and today only six of those survive. One of the surviving six is this one in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, which despite being hidden under a tree, I managed to spot using Bing Maps.

The K5 was a plywood kiosk for temporary use, so it was for the K6 model that the Post Office returned to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott for his skills. Designed in 1935 to commemorate the silver jubilee of King George V, the K6 was the first red kiosk to be used extensively outside of London, and thousands were deployed in virtually every town and city. By the time production ceased on the K6, there were nearly 70,000 across the UK.

K6, Regent Road, Edinburgh. Grade II listed.

K6 (with traffic cone), Jowett Walk, Oxford. Grade II listed.

The K7 model by Neville Conder never went to production, so it was up to Bruce Martin to carry on the fine tradition that Scott had begun, and in 1968 the true successor to the K6 was finally launched. Used mostly for new locations, the K8 was a slightly different shade of red, had a flatter roof, and only one big window on each side.

According to The Twentieth Century Society, today only twelve of the original K8s remain in working order², two of which are installed on the east side of the Erskine Bridge, just west of Glasgow.

Coinciding with the privatisation in 1984 of the Post Office’s telephone successor, British Telecom, a more utilitarian design of telephone box began to be introduced.

The classic K6 was widely replaced with the frankly hideous KX100, and basically we’ve all been complaining about it ever since. In the late 90s, BT made an attempt to win the public over to the KX range by introducing the KXPlus which is basically a KX100 with a red bar round the sides and a domed red roof. It didn’t work.

With the introduction of the KX100, around 2,000 existing boxes were given listed status, several thousand others were left in rural locations, but many more were sold off privately.

Lots of K6s have recently been restored and reinstalled in key tourism spots, but even more have been put to other uses; ranging from shower cubicles in private homes, through to this massive sculpture in Kingston upon Thames made of 12 tumbling boxes, entitled Out of Order.

There are several companies who specialise in selling and restoring old phone boxes, including Unicorn Kiosks, who are responsible for this 12-foot-tall custom kiosk in Maida Vale, London.

So if you’re one of the many fans of the classic red phone box, you’ve now got no excuse not to come up with a creative way to save a piece of Britain’s heritage, you’d just have to do is decide what to do with it!

Of course there are many more phone boxes around the world… have you got one near you?

For helping me research this post, many thanks go to Robert Ore of redphonebox.info, headington.org.uk, and www.cvphm.org.

This rather innocuous-looking bridge over the River Thames is the latest in a long line of bridges to stand on this spot and lay claim to the name London Bridge.

This current bridge opened in 1973, but a bridge has existed at or near this very spot since the Roman occupation of the area, around 2,000 years ago. There were a number of bridges during this time, but it wasn’t until 1209 that a truly great bridge was erected.

The Medieval London Bridge took a seriously lengthy 33 years to build, but it would have been pretty impressive in its day, as it was completely covered in shops set in the base of buildings seven stories tall!

For 600 years the Medieval bridge was a bustling and relatively safe haven in the centre of London, but eventually it was decided that it was too old, narrow and decrepit¹ to serve Londoners any longer, and that it should be replaced.

In 1799 Thomas Telford proposed a bridge with a single iron arch that would span the entire river, but it was rejected due to worries about feasibility. The bridge that was finally completed in 1831 was built 30 m west of the Medieval one, and was designed by Scots civil engineer John Rennie.

By 1896 the “New” London bridge had become the busiest point in London (with around 9,000 people crossing every hour), so it was widened by 4 metres to combat the acute congestion. On the disused railway track at the old Swelltor Quarry on Dartmoor, you can still see left over granite pillars that were quarried as part of this process, but never used.

Unfortunately the bridge couldn’t cope with the extra weight – after widening, it began to sink by about 3 cm every 8 years, meaning that yet another new bridge would be required.

However, instead of knocking the bridge down, in 1967 the City of London council hit upon the brilliant idea of putting the bridge up for sale; and on 18 April 1968, Rennie’s bridge was sold to the American entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for $2.4m dollars, and subsequently moved, brick-by-brick to Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

The story goes that McCulloch mistakenly believed he was buying (the frankly much more desirable) Tower Bridge, but of course this has been vehemently denied. Regardless, the reconstructed London Bridge forms the centrepiece of a English-style theme park that has since become Arizona’s second most popular tourist attraction, being only less-visited than the Grand Canyon.

(London Bridge was previously featured back in 2006 before the advent of Street View).

This is the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, or to give it its full Welsh name, Traphont Ddŵr Pontcysyllte¹, which carries the Llangollen Canal over the valley of the River Dee in north east Wales, and which has recently been recognised as one of the most important engineering accomplishments of all time.

Completed over 200 years ago, this stunningly beautiful engineering masterpiece was designed by everyone’s favourite² civil engineer Thomas Telford (1757 – 1834), and to this day it remains the longest and highest aqueduct in the UK.

Despite scepticism at the time (this was the late 1700s after all), Telford was convinced he could build a cast iron trough to carry the canal over the massive 307 metre span of the valley. After all, he had seen his methods succeed at Longdon-on-Tern, where he had designed the world’s first cast iron navigable aqueduct.

Originally constructed as part of the now long-abandoned Shrewsbury Canal, today the Longdon-on-Tern aqueduct still sits astride the River Tern, and is not only Grade I listed but is also a scheduled ancient monument.

Despite this previous experience, the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is truly a testament to Telford’s genius. The cast iron trough he designed soars 38 metres above the valley floor, regularly carrying narrowboats safely³ over the valley.

In ultimate recognition of its importance, on the 27th of June 2009, the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, joining a list of nearly 900 other places of great cultural or physical significance that includes such treasures as the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and Stonehenge.

Thanks to the ever on-the-ball Jonathan Rawle. See the Wikipedia links in this article for more info, or explore Wikipedia’s list of works by Thomas Telford.