Medieval Canterbury and modern day Detroit have more in common than you’d think
Destruction, redevelopment and the fragility of urban culture.
My office at Canterbury Christ Church University overlooks the abbey founded in 597 by Augustine, an initially reluctant Benedictine monk whose mission to England under the aegis of Pope Gregory the Great made Canterbury the cornerstone of English Christianity that it remains today. The Anglo-Saxon monk and historian Bede memorably describes the procession of Augustine and his entourage into the mostly derelict walled city of Canterbury, preceded by the cross as a symbol of Christian victory over the curses heaped upon the British by God because of their failings in faith.
One of my current projects, on the representation of early medieval settlements in their contemporary literature, focuses in part on missionary activity in England, where the founding of churches in derelict Roman towns played a significant role in their ideological rehabilitation. These places are memorably represented in an Old English elegy known as The Ruin, which speaks of an anonymous urban location that is often been claimed to be Bath:
Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it,
The city buildings fell apart, the works
Of giants crumble. Tumbled are the towers,
Ruined the roofs, and broken the barred gate,
Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape,
Torn and collapsed and eaten up by age.
(trans. Richard Hamer).
Over a thousand years later, Canterbury is one of those places whose destruction by war in the twentieth century proved instrumental to our understanding of the archaeology and history of Britain’s towns and cities, and the significance of Canterbury before it took its present form; a mélange of ancient buildings and modern developments, all of which play their part in its life today.
But this is far from ancient history. The story of what happened to Canterbury and places like it in the wake of Roman occupation is just as relevant in the developed west in our time.
At the beginning of my third-year module in Old and Middle English literature, we reviewed part of Julien Temple’s 2009 documentary ‘Requiem for Detroit?’. Amongst other things, this documentary explores the collapse of the automobile industry in Detroit, and its impact upon the city, its people, and its culture.
Temple’s documents Detroit’s industrial collapse, which has led to an economic vacuum in the inner city, whilst suburban prosperity endures — but also reclamation of the urban ruins by those living at subsistence level. This is a familiar narrative to early medievalists; town life had ended in Roman Britain for related reasons, and was not to return for half a millennium.
The documentary ends with a first-person journey through modern-day Detroit, accompanied by a voiceover intoning the lines quoted above. Like much of Britain’s landscape, Canterbury’s present is firmly rooted in its past, and the endurance of its ancient fabric alongside modern redevelopment is a testament to the fragility of urban culture and its dependence on economic production.
Augustine’s abbey is now a ruin, and Christ Church itself is built over the remains of its outlying buildings, which poke through the foliage here and there alongside their twentieth century successors. At the same time, therefore, this architectural palimpsest serves as a reminder of the reflection on the past, present, and future that has taken place here over the course of centuries (albeit with some lengthy breaks in time!) and our continuing engagement with this process as students and scholars of human culture.
By Dr Michael Bintley, Senior Lecturer, English and Language Studies.
