Notes: This description is taken from Townsend's wonderful guidebook to Canterbury published in 1950. (See details in the bibliography.)

"The Cemetery Gate [along the street] has a staid but charming dignity; the Great Gate a rich swagger about it ....

Above its deep-set door is an upper storey panelled with a band of elegant tracery and niches carried outwards across both the angle towers.

The towers rise so high above the battlements of the gatehouse that they would look topheavy were they not tied down by this belt of enrichment and by the sweep of dark shadow lying against the door in the depth of the arch.

Until 1942 a garden, a few trees, a double line of some of the pleasantest houses in the town, the wide space of the moat and the high curtain of the city wall facing this gateway all made a pretty forecourt to the abbey.

All but one of the houses, [I suppose he means no. 1 Lady Wootton's Green] which were full of stones and flints rifled from the monastery buildings, have disappeared, but the bomb damage to the gateway itself has been made good." (Townsend 1950:16)