Story of Canterbury

The Story of Canterbury by EF Lincoln, 156 pages

The Story of Canterbury is a brief history of the development of the city from the Cantii Gauls to the postwar years, through its time in the Roman province of Britain, the capital of the Kentish kingdom, the seat of the primate of England, a famed center of pilgrimage, a haven for Huguenot refugees, and a modest center of trade struggling to find a balance between past and future.  It is an interesting story simply and appealingly told, though with the inevitable Whiggish slant.

If the natural center of the story is the shrine of St Thomas, the focus of so much of the city's late medieval life, towards the end another shrine appears, that of the Invicta locomotive that first pulled a train from Canterbury to Whitstable, after a procession through the town center amid the pealing bells of the Cathedral and the cheers of great throngs of people.  Rarely has the unquiet ghost of Henry Adams been more invisibly and profoundly present.