Kent Maps Online

Welcome to Kent Maps Online!

Kent Maps Online is an open access, Digital Heritage project developed by Canterbury Christ Church University in collaboration with JSTOR Labs. Our aim is to start new conversations between researchers across all disciplines, with a shared interest in the history of Kent.

Entries draw on a range of archival sources including: maps, pictures and postcards, manuscript records and newspapers. Click on the pin or image icons to view historic maps or pictures integrated into each article.

The site is fully searchable, with hyperlinks on each page, to help you find your own answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet.

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Landscape Art and Canterbury Cathedral

Landscape art around Canterbury Cathedral charts a shift from idealized seventeenth-century panoramas to nineteenth-century pastoral and picturesque scenes that fold piety, power, and leisure into views of fields, rivers, and sky. Engravings and paintings by Hollar, the Buck brothers, Palmer, and others show how patronage, Anglican authority, and new mobility such as the railway reshaped what the cathedral meant within its rural setting.

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Canterbury Cathedral in its Landscape Setting

Canterbury Cathedral’s towers shape how people read the surrounding hills, orchards, water meadows, and suburbs from the medieval period to the present. Early modern and modern maps, along with accounts of paths, agriculture, and industry, reveal how cartography and viewpoint privilege civic power while obscuring lived routes, labour, and contested land. The shrinking orchard belt and threatened sightlines show the cathedral’s visual dominance as an environmental and heritage problem as much as an architectural one.