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You might have seen our reconstructions of the sites associated with Thomas Becket in @No1Cathedral, but over the last year we (@CandCYork) also made this - a digital model of the city of Canterbury in the mid-15th century. So I thought I'd do a thread on some of the highlights / 
The Cathedral dominates the city, and is vastly bigger than anything else within the walls. We wanted to show how, like the city itself, it was for most of the 15th C a building site - Bell Harry and the Martyrdom chapel are under construction and under scaffold /2
The view from the Bullstake - the Sun Inn is under construction (the inn sign is a bit of a conceit here!). Christchurch gate has not been built, but evidence suggests the previous gate would have been much like that at Gloucester, so we used a version of that 3/
The view from Greyfriars gardens: Greyfriars on the left; Poor Priests in the centre; the Cathedral in the left middle distance and St Augustine's on the right horizon. Because we modelled everything 'in the round' we can render out views from any position within the city 4/
Research - a combination of early maps and Urry's plotting of the medieval city; the vast amount of excavating and recording Canterbury Archaeological Trust has done; general historical/archival trawling, and sometimes (as with Blackfriars) near-contemporary drawings! 5/
We wanted to show a city that was 'lived in' - the southern half suffered greatly after the Black Death, and the castle was partly ruinous in the mid-15th century so we made it look 'shabby'! Note the refuse pits and piles scattered around - all in the archaeological reports! 6/
This is the 'Cheker of the Hope', the vast inn where Chaucer's pilgrims stayed. In the 15th C 'Tale of Beryn' the Wife of Bath visits the innkeeper's herb-garden, so you can see where we put it in to the left! We also put in the actual bull-stake - all about the details! 7/
Quite a few of the buildings still survive in part, and not just the churches. St Mary Northgate survives, although the Northgate itself doesn't. Even better, you can still go for a pint in the Parrot Inn (T-shaped building on the left)! /8
To the north of the King's Bridge/Eastbridge - the King's Mill and All Saints' church, both now lost; to the south the 12th C pilgrims' hospital of St Thomas the Martyr at Eastbridge, still very much extant and open for visitors - there's more to Canterbury than the Cathedral! /9
Canterbury is a World Heritage Site that includes St Augustine's Abbey and St Martin's church (the oldest continually-used site of Christian worship in England), and the model shows how close they are - just over the ring road and well worth a visit! /10
We tried to make the research as comprehensive as possible given the time constraints, so I could happily talk about why we made any bit of the city look like it did - please ask if you have a query. Like the campanile in the cathedral precincts - weird-looking, but Kentish!
This house is mentioned in a charter of the 12th century as 'by the great willow' on the edge of St Mildred's churchyard and it is also on a c.1640 map of the city. The owner had to keep the weir clean. I was so excited about it that it's 'John's house' in the model files
The potential for all this is vast. We will be making the renders publicly accessible through @Becket2020 and other platforms. We can also drop it into a game engine and start walking around, although what we actually do with that (and where the money comes from) is the next step
