People have lived here since the Paleolithic, drawn by the River Stour and the natural defensible terrain. The Celtic Cantiaci held the site when Roman legions arrived in the first century AD and built Durovernum Cantiacorum - stronghold of the Cantiaci by the alder grove. Roman Canterbury covered 130 acres inside a defensive wall, with theatres and baths and a forum. After the Romans withdrew, Jutish refugees moved in over the following century, possibly intermarrying with the locals. The Old English name became Cantwareburh, stronghold of the Kentish men. By 630 AD, gold coins were being struck at the Canterbury mint. Then in 597 Pope Gregory sent Augustine of Canterbury to convert the Anglo-Saxons. The mission stayed, and from that founding moment, Canterbury became the mother see of the English church.

Becket's murder in 1170 made Canterbury an international destination. The four knights had ridden from Henry II's Christmas court at Bures in Normandy after the king reportedly muttered something about turbulent priests - though Henry would later do public penance, walking barefoot through Canterbury and submitting to a flogging by the monks. The shrine raised over Becket's tomb in 1220 attracted pilgrims from every part of Europe. Geoffrey Chaucer used that pilgrim road in the late 1380s as the frame for The Canterbury Tales, his unfinished masterpiece in which a Knight, a Wife of Bath, a Miller, a Pardoner, and twenty-six others ride toward Canterbury telling stories along the way. Chaucer never finished. The pilgrimage did not survive the Reformation. But the road remained, and the cathedral kept its pull. Today the Bell Harry Tower - completed in 1498 after 400 years of building - rises 235 feet above the city centre, visible for miles across the Kent countryside.

Canterbury has been a refuge city before. In 1548, the first Huguenot congregation in England formed in Canterbury, founded by Jan Utenhove and others fleeing Protestant persecution in the Low Countries. When Catholic Queen Mary I came to the throne in 1553, the Huguenots fled again, scattering to Emden, Zurich, Strasbourg, Geneva. After Elizabeth I's accession they returned. In 1576 they began holding services in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral itself - a French-speaking Protestant congregation worshipping below the bones of an English Catholic saint, in the heart of Anglican Canterbury. By the seventeenth century, French-speaking Huguenots made up two-fifths of the city's population. They brought silk weaving with them, and by 1676 silk had overtaken wool as Canterbury's defining industry. The half-timbered Huguenot Old Weaver's House still stands by the River Stour, one of the most photographed buildings in the city.

On the night of 1 June 1942, German bombers attacked Canterbury - one of a series of raids that historians later called the Baedeker Blitz because the Luftwaffe was working from tourist guidebooks, deliberately targeting English cities of high cultural and historical value. Over the course of the war, 10,445 bombs fell on Canterbury across 135 separate raids. They destroyed 731 homes and 296 other buildings. They killed 119 civilians in the borough. The cathedral somehow survived almost intact - fire watchers stationed on its roofs put out incendiaries as they fell - but the medieval streets around it did not. The missionary college was destroyed. Simon Langton Girls' Grammar School was destroyed. After the war, the bombed area was eventually rebuilt and a ring road was constructed outside the city walls, leaving the centre pedestrianised. In 2000 a major redevelopment of the Whitefriars Shopping Centre prompted the Canterbury Archaeological Trust's Big Dig, supported by Channel Four's Time Team, which exposed layer upon layer of buried history.

Modern Canterbury runs on three things: tourism, retail, and education. The University of Kent opened in 1965 on St Stephen's Hill, a mile north of the city centre. Canterbury Christ Church University, founded as a teacher training college in 1962, became a full university in 2005 - it now has around 30,000 students. The University for the Creative Arts adds a smaller third campus. Altogether the student population approaches 40,000, in a city of 55,000 permanent residents. That balance gives Canterbury an unusual texture for a small English city - young, multilingual, lively in term time and quieter when the students go home. The Marlowe Theatre - rebuilt in 2011 with a 1,200-seat auditorium and named for Christopher Marlowe, who was born in Canterbury in 1564 - hosts touring productions. The Canterbury Festival fills two weeks in October. And down at the cathedral, services are still held three or more times a day, the same daily round of prayer that has continued, with interruptions, since Augustine arrived in 597.

Walk Canterbury's centre today and you walk through layered time. The Westgate, the only one of the seven medieval city gates not demolished in 1787, still arches over Canterbury Castle Road, with its towers now serving as a small museum about its days as the city jail. The 17th-century Crooked House on Palace Street leans so dramatically that visitors photograph it constantly - it now operates as a bookshop for the Catching Lives homelessness charity. The half-timbered houses, the Norman castle ruins, the King's School - founded by Augustine and the oldest surviving secondary school in the United Kingdom - and the Bell Harry Tower rising over all of it. The Stour still curves through the city, and small punts take visitors past the back gardens of medieval buildings. Of every English city that calls itself ancient, Canterbury has the strongest claim. It has been a place worth coming to for two thousand years.