The Knowhere Guide

Best and Worst in Canterbury, Kent*

Canterbury, Kent Triumphs and Tragedies

Favourite Building

• The old library on the High Street opposite the post office.
• The Weaver's Cottages by the river, and the old hospital opposite - very old & beautiful buildings surrounded by 1060s / 70s crap!!
• Cathederal. If you are into God or not, this building has to be seen !
• Multy-story carpark, may it rest in peaces
• Okakabasi Kebab Shop.
• The clocktower
• St augustine's abbey
• Definitely Canterbury Cathedral even though i have to work there every summer and deal with a million annoying tourists

Demolish It Now Building

• multi-storey car park. flatten it and reduce the number of suicides.
• Please demolish the shit hole known as the Bizz. The only people who go there are towny twats who have far too many ear rings and talk like theve got a dick permanently stuck up their arse. Actually fuck it and nuke the whole of Canterbury!!!!!!
• Quite a lot of it. Ricemans dept store, the tannery, the Bizz/the Works etc etc.
• Marlows theatre big and ugly. No building inside city walls is bigger than two stories except Marlows and the Cathederal.
• That damn cathedral, maybe then all the conservative biblebashing arseholes who won't let us open any clubs might go too
• Burton's/Dorothy Perkins. A hideous square concrete edifice.
• thank god ricemans is going
• All the buildings in Military Road (Council and Tax offices)....:>)
• Everything that was built in the mad 60s when they forgot about the fact that the city is VERY old and historic.... all those horrible concrete blobs!
• The Works / Bizz Nightclub. Cathedral (Brings in far to many tourists :)
• Nasty woolworths building in the high street
• Cut Price Cards ( near the bus station)
• Ricemans, opposite the bus station, mind you that can be demolished as well!
• The Marlowe theatre destroy please. it is a cream and coffee coloured block in the middle of the most beautiful part of the city.
• The works/Bizz night club, and replace it with a club with atmosphere

The Best Things

• kev the chestnut seller and all the stallholders.
• The lovely surrounding rural countryside to the southwest of Canterbury in the Chilham-Challock areas
• Alabama soft rock pie in Marlowes and fajitas in Cafe des Amies and ofcourse the University of Kent.
• Stacks of pubs, a nice, non-threatening community atmosphere.
• spinning the beer wheel in the cherry tree and playing spot the englishman on a saturday morning (its impossible). having no cruddy clubs that everyone feels compelled to go to when pissed.
• The great countryside all around Canterbury to the coast...
• About 80 of the stores are on some police scheme and all the sales assistants have walkie talkies. The CCTV is brilliant and follows people all around the city. Crime rate is apparently going down because of this massive scheme.
• Fit foreign birds
• The Westgate gardens. The River Stour and the walks along it. The Dane john gardens, and sitting in the Cathedral grounds eating a packed lunch while escaping from the tedium of studies!
• the best thing was the cathdrals
• Good kebab shop. Lots of good pubs.
• The atmosphere, the peope , the place
• Friendly and old.
• Watching the doubledeckers fit through Westgate with an inch to spare on either side...no seriously, really nice city with gorgeous city walls.
• The architecture, buskers, pubs and general mad people
• For a population of 35,000 Canterbury has more broadcasting radio stations than any other town of its size - as of November 1996- Invicta FM 102.8FM. Invicta Supergold 603AM. CHR 945AM. Pity most of them play tunes for the golden oldie residents...
• Everywhere having student discounts as there are so many of them.
• The man who sells hot frsh doughnuts outside Our Price.
• Shopping.
• Being very sophisticated and drinking coffee on the pavement tables at Marlowes.

The Worst Things

• The large population of old people and "care in the community" beggers. The sign that says "Welcome to Herne Bay coastal LEISURE town" like we're all dossers and there's really something to do in Herne Bay. The greedy landlords that turned the town into bedsit land. The greedy Arcade owners. The lack of decent shops. Dismal nightlife. Possibly the worst taxi and bus drivers in the country.
• Tourists, especially 12 year olds on coach trips who feel it is necessary to spray their hair multicoloured and insist on spraying any passer by with fart spray, i really dont recommend Canterbury in the summer there is really no room to move.
• tourists, police, wannabe hippies, psuedo punks,THE CHURCH, christchurch college.
• Canterbury has the worst parking problem in the country considering its size and amount of shops and roads.The Council planners are either thick and from the dark ages or have a death wish with regards to shopping in Canterbury and tourism.{They dont have a clue] Be carefull when staying at Canterbury Hospital In the wards they wash the bedpans up in the same sink as the teacups and they all drain out together on the same draining board look for yourself next time you visit there uuuurrgghhh!!Check out the dirty floors with all yellow sticky tape over dirt filled cracks ooooohhhhhh!!!
• All chavvies,townies diddy coys or what ever you want to be known as should take an excessive ammount of ajax intraveniously and then put their worthless head into the nearest vice like object and tighten untill their head cracks open and their pea sized brain rolls out onto the floor!!!!!!Wankers!!!!!!!! From the one time bad boy chavvie hater!!!!
• No nightlife.
• The tourists, espcaly the kids on school day trips.
• There's nowhere to buy a cup of coffee after about 5pm, and the cinema's crap.
• the fact that the penny has closed (as far as i know). the pissy policemen who will not let you drink . . ever . . anywhere, or indeed to nick beer glasses from the pubs (a god-given right).
• Be warey of some of the 4x4 car dealers theres lots of them???
• Canterbury is a complete building site now (March 2000). The bus station is being knocked down, roads around BHS have many mini roundabouts, but no room to drive, Ricemans will be knocked down, the bus station has become 2 way, dirt, dust etc. Workmen who appear to never work and cannot operate the HGV'S. Superdrug has moved. Poundstop has moved. Pilot always appears to be closing down, then doesn't. New pedestrian crossings everywhere, but you can't get to them because the path is the middle of the road as gas etc is permanently being dug up. Not one apology sign in sight. The council have put taxi lanes in place of normal roads, leaving one lane for normal traffic. It appears they don't want anyone in the city driving and want them to use park and ride. Except themselves, of course. The clock tower is always on the wrong time, there are about 3 traffic wardens around the bus station at any one time, but never around cars. Oh and of course the council for fining an extraordinary number of people last year for not putting cigarettes in bins and dropping them in the city with normal rubbish, yet not providing a means of stubbing out the cigarettes.
• The tourists take over the town centre _every_day_
• The huge number of tourists - the main language in Canterbury throughout the summer is FRENCH! The fact that the Cathedral controls just about everything within the city walls, and puts people out of business in the name of profit! Being charged to enter the cathedral grounds, unless you can prove that you are: a student at the Uni or Christ Church College; a church-goer from one of the churches under the Diocese of Canterbury; or a worker in the town centre.
• Bad nightlife unless you are a student. Nasty locals, High Crime rate.
• French schoolkids with coloured hair spray
• French kids, Anselms students (both with silly string)
• Stagecoach now own the buses - ridiculously expensive to travel from the uni down to town
• No club so to speak , too many french school kids and public transports shit
• Horribly expensive pubs, food etc. Full of French 10-year old kids screaming their heads off. Impossible to get a decent house at a reasonable price.
• Hordes and hordes of school parties and French tourists.
• Asking directions to places - most people you'll meet are tourists too!
• The Tannery - phew.
• Too much traffic please come by train or use the park and ride.
• Successive Councils caused more architectural/cultural damage than Hitler's bombs.
• Too crowded and touristy.
• Forget trying to drive round the city in rush hour - walking is much faster.
• The University on top of the hill is noted as one of the most Maternalistic in the world. Woe betide you if you live in college and don't make it home by midnight!
  This all changed while I was living on campus there ('91-'92). While the colleges are still shut at midnight all students now have an electronic keycard to let them in. This does have the disadvantage that you can't get into colleges other than your own but hanging around the entrance and following someone in always worked for me. I certainly never noticed any maternalism from the uni, though apparently it was rather bad in the '70s.

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Credits

Last updated: 2007-08-14