This tour will take visitors back in time to explore St John’s Hospital which was founded in c.1080 by Archbishop Lanfranc. Some of the buildings date from this initial construction, including the toilet block that only went out of use in the 1940s. As well as this original stone building, visitors will be shown the chapel and Elizabethan refectory in which are housed artefacts and features from the hospital’s medieval past. This magnificent institution is rarely open to the public and this guided tour offers a rare opportunity to investigate one of Canterbury’s hidden medieval gems.

Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh’s book on English medieval hospitals looks especially at the hospitals of Sandwich, Dover, and Canterbury. She has also written numerous articles on a wide variety of medieval and early modern social history topics that use case studies from Kent, ranging from late medieval piety to Canterbury’s fifteenth-century business-women. She is particularly interested in medieval towns and their townspeople, and she uses such studies in her postgraduate teaching at Canterbury Christ Church University and at the University of Kent.

NB: Please take care to select the correct ticket type. In-venue tickets are £10 and online tickets are £9. If you book 10 or more tickets of any given type (e.g. 10 tickets to one lecture, or 1 ticket to 10 lectures) within a single transaction, then you should select the '10+' ticket type to get a discount. Schools can buy a single ticket for £95 which will grant online access to all of their students.

Live streams are accessed online via Microsoft Teams. Computers (PCs, laptops and Macs) can join using your web browser, but if you wish to attend using a tablet or phone, you will have to install the Microsoft Teams app. There will not be recordings available once the event has taken place, so please ensure you attend at the correct time.

As Covid-19 restrictions continue to change, please make sure you are aware of the current regulations before attending. Emails confirming the University's expectations will be sent out prior to the event.