Rare piece of Kent content on HN! I went to the University of Canterbury, and there's a beautiful walk all the way from Canterbury to Whitstable - absolutely lovely part of the world. Canterbury is a slightly smaller version of other cathedral cities like Cambridge or Oxford and while the university isn't as highly rated (and was mostly architected in the 60s by a guy who also designed prisons), the Computer Science department is really good, especially the coverage of functional programming.
There's a beautiful walk between Folkestone and Dover that somehow even people who live in Kent aren't aware of. It's especially good for geeky types as there is some lovely infrastructure to see and learn about. The railway snakes along the coastline, weaving in and out of the cliffs. You can walk below the railway or up on the cliff above it. There are signs of early attempts at a channel tunnel from the 1800s and, of course, the real channel tunnel. In particular Samphire Hoe which was created using the earth removed from the tunnel and now houses ventilation fans for the tunnel.
Canterbury is a slightly smaller version of other cathedral cities like Cambridge or Oxford
Fellow Canterbury fan here, and this might even be underselling it to people unaware of British history. Canterbury is physically smaller for sure, but significantly outranks OxCam in terms of historical and ecclesiastical value; its cathedral being the mother church of the entire Anglican communion.
Oxford cathedral is actually the college chapel of Christ Church, a college of Oxford University. It's not open to the public. You need a letter from your anglican parish priest confirming that you are a church member if you want to visit.
It's not even a landmark; the chapel is inside the college walls, and barely visible from the street. The striking tower over Christ Church (Tom Tower) is over the college gatehouse, and not part of the chapel.
Tom Tower, by the way, is named for Great Tom, the bell that chimes the hours. It used to chime local time, which in Oxford is nine minutes behind UTC. Nowadays it chimes UTC hours (formerly GMT).
I suppose I’m guilty of conflating dreaming spires and river punts with Anglican dioceses, I just didn’t want prospective students to rock up on an open day disappointed. :)
I think the best "dreaming spire" is the spire of St. Mary's Church, billed as the University Church. There's a spiral staircase up the inside of the spire, made of very worn stone, and a narrow viewing platform around the top, from which you can look down and see the layout of the quads of several of the most-famous colleges. And you can rub noses with a couple of gargoyles.
Fellow Kent alumni here! The CS department also has (or had?) the lecturer who wrote the textbook and IDE for most "Intro to OOP" courses, which was cool.
Studied Computer Systems Engineering from 2003 - 2007. Always looked forward to Winston Waller's lectures, which typically involved regailing us of control systems he built for various breweries.
Yet another alumni. UKC also had the lecturer who wrote the text book for functional programming - Simon Thompson - Haskell
The Craft of Functional Programming (I think!). It was used at other unis including Durham.
Incidentally, I now live nearer to Holy Island with it's disappearing causeway, which is mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Would definitely recommend a visit as it can be stunning in the right weather.
I lived in London for 4 years and this walk was my wife and I's favorite. We always took visitors to do it. Really beautiful and from an outsider's perspective feels very "British" :)
That's funny. I went for an open day in the UK Computer Science dept in 1999. It was an exciting department but one of the things that put me off was the internet was so slow in the lab it was almost unusable. Perhaps they were having a bad day...
UKC was on Janet so it shouldn’t have been so terrible compared to other institutions. One of the biggest issues back then was people running remote X sessions on shared departmental machines so everything would grind to a halt at the start of lessons (unless you knew how to use Blackbox etc). And all the best machines were reserved for multimedia students.
Certainly in the 90s through HENSA and the UK Mirror Service it was responsible for hosting huge amounts of useful software. I always chose mirror.ac.uk as my mirror in Debian for sentimental reasons.
If this 'disappearing street' interests you, you may also want to check out the causeway that takes one out to Lindisfarne (aka Holy Island) in Northumberland.
Tides allowing, you can drive out to the island and back. And inevitably, each year, people ignore the prominent warnings and crossing times, and end up stranded halfway over - often with a waterlogged engine and nowhere to go.
I once visited Lindisfarne. I remember joking about all the idiots that disregard the warnings, or cut it too close.
On the way back to the mainland we stopped on the causeway to make some sketches from what we figured was a pretty unique perspective. And of course we somehow lost track of time.
We made it back just fine, but with a narrow enough margin that we felt rather sheepish.
For any tourists to the UK, Whitstable is a nice seaside town to visit. Slightly alternative, shops are mostly independent rather than chains, and loads of seafood options. You can get the high speed train from St Pancras in London.
I nearly ran around on this. Barrelling towards it in my gaff cutter because my crew read the depth above chart datum as the depth below. Turned aside at the last minute when the waves started looking suspicious.
Another friend rescued two children who had become stranded as the tide came in behind them. Ran his barge around, hoiked them on board and gave them tea as they waited for the tide to float them off again. Fun times.
My partner's uncle and aunt have a holiday home right on that beach, just down from these pictures. We have of course enjoyed the privilege of staying there. We arrived in the dead of night, and there are no lights on the beach, so finding the house and then the keyhole was difficult to the point the woman next door thought we were trying to break in.
Just in case anyone is considering this, make sure you understand how tides work and are aware of the tide times before going anywhere near the sea here. A spring tide comes in faster than you can run.
It's worth experiencing the tide in a safer place like one of the North Norfolk beaches. At low tide the beaches are vast and mostly sand. Stay away from mud. If you walk right out as the tide is coming back in you'll find yourself walking backwards to avoid the incoming tide. You need to keep your wits about you to avoid wet feet. In particular make sure your path back to land is on high ground and isn't getting inundated behind you. People get cut off by the tide all the time, but it's usually because they've sat down somewhere out there.
In a similar kind of vein is the bridleway between Hayling Island and Langstone. You can see most of it at low tide, and there's a post marking it on one side. It's marked on ordnance survey maps as a bridleway too.
The only problem is that even at low tide you need to swim through two sections of it
90 Mile Beach in New Zealand is a little like this, but goes along the beach not out to sea. It’s an alternative to our main route north - state highway 1.
It’s 88km long and while you can drive on it just fine, people ruin their cars on it regularly.
