Canterbury Cathedral

Canterbury Cathedral tickets: which one to buy

A single ticket covers the cathedral, the crypt, the cloisters and the precincts, and includes a media guide; booking online saves a little and skips the ticket desk. Free volunteer-led tours run several times a day and are included, so paying for a private guide is rarely necessary. The Corona Tower tour, a guided climb of about 100 steps to the east end roof space with views over the city, is a separate timed ticket and the best extra on offer.

Attending a service costs nothing: Evensong is sung most weekdays at half past five, and sitting in the quire while the choir works is the way many locals experience the building. Combination tours from London pair the cathedral with Leeds Castle and the Dover cliffs, cost many times the entry and give you about two hours here. Canterbury is an hour from London by fast train, which makes an independent day trip easy. Kent residents and Church of England parishioners enter free on production of proof, and the cathedral shop sells an annual pass that pays for itself in two visits.

Visiting Canterbury Cathedral: what to see

Augustine founded a cathedral here in 597 and the present building began after the Norman conquest, but the event that shaped it came in 1170, when four knights murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket in the north-west transept. The spot is marked by a modern sculpture of jagged swords, and the pilgrim traffic to his shrine paid for the Gothic east end rebuilt after the fire of 1174 by William of Sens. The shrine itself was destroyed on Henry VIII's orders in 1538; a single candle marks where it stood.

The Trinity Chapel around it keeps twelve of the original miracle windows, among the finest medieval glass in Britain. The nave, rebuilt in the Perpendicular style in the 1370s, rises 24 metres on slender piers. In the crypt, the oldest part of the building, Romanesque capitals are carved with beasts and musicians. Edward the Black Prince lies in bronze effigy nearby, and Henry IV is the only English king buried here. The Bell Harry tower over the crossing, built in the 1490s, is the last great addition and gives the cathedral its silhouette above the city.

Canterbury Cathedral opening hours and the best time to go

Open to visitors Monday to Saturday from mid-morning to mid-afternoon and on Sunday afternoons, with services taking priority throughout; the cathedral closes to sightseeing during major liturgies. Mornings are quieter than afternoons in summer. The precincts are large and pleasant in good weather; in winter the unheated nave is genuinely cold. Allow ninety minutes inside, two and a half hours with the tower tour and the cloisters. Photography without flash is allowed.

Dress is not policed. The city walls, the Norman castle ruins and the remains of St Augustine's Abbey, part of the same World Heritage Site, are all within a short walk, and the abbey ticket is separate and cheap. The precinct gates close in the evening, so the classic view of the west front from Burgate is best caught before dusk. Canterbury itself is compact, and the walk from the station takes fifteen minutes through the pedestrian centre.