Westgate Gardens sits along the River Stour in the shadow of England's largest surviving medieval city gateway, and it rewards closer attention than most visitors give it.

The river here is no ordinary stream: it's one of Britain's rare chalk streams, rising in the North Downs and flowing gin-clear at a constant ten degrees all year round. Embedded in the path is a cobblestone outline marking the site of a Roman ford, once the city's main route to Watling Street and London beyond.

The gardens contain a Burma Campaign memorial, a sensory garden, a maze and a remarkable plane tree with a grotesquely swollen trunk, said to be a bacterial gall. Since 2024, a submerged glass-fibre sculpture of Ophelia lies in the river nearby, referencing a 16th-century drowning that may have inspired Shakespeare.

VoiceMap's city walls tour traces the Stour's history from Roman ford to Industrial Revolution mill, connecting the river to Canterbury's water supply, its medieval defences and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.