Georgian Canterbury was a thriving city. Assembly rooms, pleasure gardens, and an annual race meeting helped satisfy the recreational expectations of a leisured elite and the city even had its own mineral springs (on the site of the Pound Lane car park). Its appearance was transformed as an act of parliament authorised a wide-scale programme of ‘improvements’.

Timber-framed buildings acquired new brick frontages and a vast barracks complex was built along the new Military Road. Canterbury was the undoubted social and commercial centre of east Kent but its significance did not extend beyond its own region. It was never able to compete with fashionable centres such as Bath – or even its upstart neighbour Tunbridge Wells.

Well-known local historian Doreen Rosman will investigate this era of great change in Canterbury during her illustrated talk.