Canterbury Festival: Lapwood Sold Out, Circa Seats Left

Canterbury Festival runs from Friday 16 to Saturday 31 October 2026, and unlike most of the district’s autumn events it is confirmed, programmed and on sale. The festival’s own count is over 130 events across sixteen days, and the brochure and booking pages were published in July.

Updated 29 September: Anna Lapwood’s Cathedral recital, both 7.15pm Circa performances and 16 other performances have sold out; three events have been cancelled and one moved. The full list is below.

One thing to understand before you read any price, because the brochure does not spell it out in the listings. Nearly every event is printed as a range starting at £10*, and that asterisk matters: the footnote at the foot of every page reads “Limited Under-30s tickets available”. The £10 is the under-30s price, not the general one.* If you are over 30, the cheapest seat is somewhere above it and you will not see the real figure until the booking step. What the same footer does tell you is welcome: “Ticket prices include a per-ticket booking fee of £1.50”, so the number on the page is the number you pay.

Dates, booking and what it costs

Booking has been open since the summer. Priority booking for Festival Friends opened on Monday 20 July at 11am and public booking on Monday 27 July at 11am. With under three weeks to go, a growing number of events have sold out.

• Box office: 01227 457568, Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm. Online booking runs 24 hours a day.
• On the door where available, card payment only. There is no cash option at venues.
• Postage costs £2 and stops ten days before your event. Collection from the venue’s pop-up box office and print-at-home e-tickets are both free.
• Concessions are means-tested, not age-tested. The festival offers them to people in financial need or with access requirements rather than to anyone over a certain age, at “typically around 10% off standard ticket prices”. Numbers are limited and proof of status may be asked for at the door.
• Under-30s get £10 tickets, which is the single biggest saving on offer here and the reason so many listings appear to start at a tenner. Joining the scheme is free and gets you limited £10 seats across the programme.
• Festival Friends membership starts at £25 a year and buys a two-week priority booking window.

Eight nights in the Cathedral

The Cathedral is where the festival spends its money, and it seats 1,100. Four of the programme’s events are staged there, across eight separate nights.

Circa: Eternity is the one to book if you book one thing. The Australian company hangs acrobats from the roof of the nave for an hour, to a recorded score of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa and Fratres played by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. There are seven performances, not five: Tuesday 20 to Thursday 22 October at 7.30pm, then two shows a night on Friday 23 and Saturday 24, at 7.15pm and 9.30pm. Tickets are £10 to £45 and it is aimed at ages 10 and over. You sit around a catwalk stage. The 7.15pm shows on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 have sold out; the three midweek nights and both 9.30pm shows still had tickets on 29 September.

Anna Lapwood opens the festival on Friday 16 October at 8pm, playing the Cathedral organ for the first time, with a programme of film music and traditional organ repertoire. Tickets were £10 to £34 and it has sold out. One thing the listing is straight about and worth reading before you buy: because of where the organ sits, the audience cannot see her. A live video feed is projected onto a large screen in the central nave instead. A limited number of £10 under-30s tickets are in the Listening Seat area.

Also in the Cathedral: Britten Sinfonia and Tenebrae’s Surround Sound Playlist on Tuesday 27 October at 7.30pm, performed as a relaxed, lie-back concert, and APOLLO5 on Thursday 29 October.

Getting in matters here. Wheelchair access to the nave is at the North West entrance, and the festival asks wheelchair users to ring the box office rather than book online so seats can be processed. Kent County Council’s automatic bollards on Burgate admit Blue Badge holders and city centre residents only, and the nearest Blue Badge drop-off is the Buttermarket.

Sold out, cancelled and moved

This is the festival’s own box office feed as of 29 September 2026. Of 140 bookable performances, 19 were marked sold out, and one more shows as sold out only because it has been cancelled.

Sold out:

• Anna Lapwood, Canterbury Cathedral, Fri 16 Oct, 8pm
• Circa: Eternity, Canterbury Cathedral, Fri 23 and Sat 24 Oct, 7.15pm (the 9.30pm shows on both nights still had seats)
• Elif Shafak, Augustine Hall, Tue 20 Oct, 7.45pm
• London African Gospel Choir: Graceland, The Great Hall, Kent College, Wed 28 Oct, 7.30pm
• Paul Merton and Suki Webster’s Improv Show, The Great Hall, Kent College, Fri 30 Oct, 8pm
• Jacqueline Wilson, Malthouse Theatre, Sat 31 Oct, 2pm
• The Mortal Immortal graphic novel workshop, Sat 31 Oct, 1.30pm session
• The Circle and the Serpent harpsichord recital, The Old Synagogue, Wed 21 Oct, 2.30pm
• An Evening with Canterbury Catch Club, The Parrot, Wed 28 Oct, 7.30pm
• Baby Playground, Beerling Hall, Mon 19 Oct, 10.30am
• Eight guided walks: All About the Journey (16 Oct), The Crab and Winkle Line Railway (17 Oct), Confusing Canterbury (17 Oct), Canterbury’s Lost Churches (20 Oct), Canterbury During WW2 (21 Oct), 17th Century Canterbury (24 Oct), Canterbury and the Bayeux Tapestry (28 Oct) and Jewish Canterbury (28 Oct)

Cancelled: Men Crowd to Listen, the Aphra Behn talk at St Paul’s Church on Saturday 17 October (“due to reasons beyond our control”; the festival says ticket holders will be contacted about refunds), and both of the Canterbury Commemoration Society’s walks, The Monuments of Canterbury (North) and (South).

Moved: the Kent College Lecture, Daniel Susskind’s What Should My Children Do?, was advertised for Thursday 15 October and is now on Monday 12 October at 5.30pm, which is before the festival formally opens.

Sold-out events can come back if tickets are returned, so the box office on 01227 457568 is worth a call.

What is free

More of the programme is free than the brochure cover suggests.

• A Mile in My Shoes, the Empathy Museum’s travelling shoe shop inside a giant shoebox, sits on the corner of the High Street and Best Lane from Friday 16 to Saturday 31 October, 11am to 4pm, closed on Monday 26 October. Free, drop in, no booking. You put on a stranger’s shoes and listen to their story. It has never been to Kent before.
• Eerie: The Canterbury Bestiary is in the Front Room Gallery at The Beaney, free, and it runs longer than the festival does: Saturday 12 September to Sunday 8 November, Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm and Sunday 11am to 4pm.
• The Illustrious Order of Fools and Beasts Unconvention takes over the city centre on Saturday 24 October, 11am to 3.30pm, with East Kent Morris and companies from around the country, big puppets and dancing at various locations. Free and drop in.
• The Big Draw: Make a Mark at Westgate Hall on Thursday 29 October, 10am to 3pm, free and drop in.

Family Takeover, Saturday 31 October

The festival’s family day fills the Malthouse Theatre from 10am to 4pm on the last Saturday, which is also Halloween. Most of it is free and drop-in:

• Night Creatures, an eco-Halloween mask workshop in recycled cardboard, Dining Room, 10am to 12.30pm and 12.30pm to 4pm, aimed at ages 7 and up with an adult.
• Canterbury Games, IC Hall, all ages, an interactive showcase from Christ Church’s games design students.
• The Reading Room, Drama Library, all ages, volunteers reading aloud.
• Ashford Community Drum Band, in the Piazza, all ages, drop in and join.
• Mimi Hobbs, this year’s Youth Music Ambassador, plays a free 20 minute recital in the Stairwell at 12.30pm.

One free session does need booking: The Mortal Immortal, a graphic novel workshop on Mary Shelley’s story at the International School next to the Malthouse, 10.30am to 12.30pm and 1.30pm to 3.30pm, ages 10 and up with an adult. The afternoon session is fully booked.

Ticketed on the same day: Jacqueline Wilson at the Malthouse at 2pm (sold out), and You’ll See, a retelling of Ulysses adapted for primary age children by Irish company Branar, at 12.30pm and 3.15pm.

The rest of the programme, by price

Prices below are as printed in the brochure, so the low figure in each is the limited under-30s ticket.

The Poetry Showcase is the exception that proves the rule: no asterisk, no £10, and a straightforward concession price instead.

Also booked in: Lindisfarne (17 October), Braimah Kanneh-Mason (21 October), Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club (27 October), the London African Gospel Choir performing Graceland (28 October), Seth Lakeman (29 October), Paul Merton and Suki Webster (30 October), Elif Shafak (20 October), Sathnam Sanghera (22 October), Jay Rayner (24 October), David Shrigley (27 October), Simon Sebag Montefiore (28 October) and William Boyd (29 October). Craig Revel Horwood turns up on 21 October to talk about the history of pantomime, which in this city is a serious subject.

Adam Kay’s support act had not been named at the time of writing.

It is not only in Canterbury

One event is over the district boundary and easy to miss. Whitstable Choral Society’s Come and Sing Day is at St Alphege Church, Whitstable, on Saturday 24 October: rehearsals from 9.30am cost £16.50, and the concert at 3.15pm is free with donations welcome. The music is Mozart’s Mass in C (K.317) and We Give Thanks by Orlando Barton-Hodges. You need choral experience to sing, not to listen.

Roads, parking and getting there

No road closure order has been published for the festival. Kent County Council’s bundles of temporary traffic orders for the Canterbury area, advertised on 13 August, 3 September, 10 September and 24 September 2026, contain nothing for any festival event, including the Fools and Beasts Unconvention that moves around the city centre on 24 October. If that changes it will appear on our roadworks and travel page first.

Most venues are inside the walls and within a short walk of each other, so the usual city centre rules apply: see the Canterbury parking page for the tariff bands and for Park and Ride, which at £4 for the car beats every city centre car park for a whole evening. The one exception is The Great Hall at Kent College, on Whitstable Road, CT2 9DT, which is outside the walls and has event parking for up to 80 cars at the rear of the site. That is the only festival venue with its own car park, and a lot of the big nights are there: the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Adam Kay, Ruby Turner and Rumer are all in the Great Hall, not in town.

For St Peter’s Methodist Church on St Peter’s Street there is limited on-street Blue Badge parking on Tower Way and the Orange Street car park nearby.

What we will update

The programme is fixed and on sale, so the things left to change are availability and the practical detail: further sold-out notices and cancellations, any road closure order that does get made for 24 October, and the support act for Adam Kay. Festival House is at 8 Orange Street, CT1 2JA, and the box office number is 01227 457568.