Cathedral city on the Fens — Norman grandeur meets modern Britain
Peterborough is an English cathedral city on the edge of the Fens, home to one of England's finest Norman cathedrals — the burial place of Catherine of Aragon and, briefly, Mary Queen of Scots. The great west front, with its three soaring Early English arches, is among the most photographed façades in English ecclesiastical architecture. The city sits at the heart of a landscape shaped by drainage — the flat black-soil Fens stretch to the horizon, punctuated by windmills and watery lanes, with Flag Fen Bronze Age archaeology nearby.
Peterborough grew around a Benedictine abbey founded in 655 CE on the site of a Roman town. The abbey church — now the cathedral — was rebuilt in its current Norman form from 1118 and consecrated in 1238; Catherine of Aragon was buried here in 1536 after her death at Kimbolton Castle. The city expanded dramatically in the 1970s as a designated 'new town', absorbing large populations from London, which makes it an unusual blend of ancient cathedral city and post-war planned settlement.