Reigate

In the thirteenth century, Reigate's High Street held a chapel dedicated to Thomas Becket and an adjoining hospice for travelers making their way toward his shrine at Canterbury. Neither survives: the chapel site now carries the town's Georgian Old Town Hall, and the hospice is only tentatively linked to the present Red Cross Inn. What remains is a documented waypoint on the broader Winchester-Canterbury pilgrim corridor, standing just south of the ridge trackway rather than directly upon it.

Reigate does not offer a ruin to walk into. What it offers is a documented absence: a rest-stop that pilgrims travelling from Winchester toward Thomas Becket's shrine in Canterbury are recorded as having used, on a site now occupied by an eighteenth-century town hall. The Chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury, raised sometime in the thirteenth century and paired with a hospice for lodging, sat beside - not directly upon - the ridge trackway later named the Pilgrims' Way, positioned to catch travelers who detoured into the town for rest, food, and a roof. Victoria County History, the earliest synthesised account available, states plainly that the chapel stood where the Town Hall now stands, and that the hospice was 'probably' the building later known as the Red Cross Inn at the west end of High Street. That word, probably, is doing real work: no excavation has confirmed the connection, and the Inn's own fabric appears to date from the seventeenth century rather than the thirteenth. Reigate's other medieval religious infrastructure - an Augustinian priory founded before 1240, and the parish church of St Mary Magdalene with fabric from around 1200 - situates the vanished chapel within a town that took its place in the pilgrim economy seriously, even without a shrine or relic of its own to draw travelers directly.

No individual founder is named in the sources located for the Chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury or its hospice; both are dated only broadly to the thirteenth century. They arose within the wider surge of Becket devotion that followed his 1170 murder in Canterbury Cathedral and 1173 canonization, when towns along routes toward his shrine built chapels and hospitality infrastructure to serve the resulting pilgrim traffic. Reigate's chapel was dedicated directly to the martyred archbishop, tying the town explicitly into this devotional network even though the building itself stood beside rather than on the ridge trackway that pilgrims are popularly imagined to have walked.

The chapel belonged to the wider medieval cult of Thomas Becket rather than to any specific monastic order; Reigate Priory nearby was an Augustinian house. Anglican parish worship at St Mary Magdalene continues an unbroken thread from the medieval church on the same site, but this is a separate institutional lineage from the vanished pilgrim chapel.

Nothing built specifically for pilgrims remains standing in Reigate. The chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury was cleared from the townscape when the site was redeveloped for the current Old Town Hall in 1728; whether the chapel had already fallen out of use by then, perhaps at or soon after the Dissolution of the 1530s, is not established in the sources located. The pilgrim hospice fares little better as physical evidence: the building now known as the Red Cross Inn is linked to it only by local tradition and by the Victoria County History's careful 'probably,' and the Inn's present fabric is recorded as seventeenth-century, decades or centuries after the hospice would have served its original purpose. What this leaves is a site whose sacredness was never rooted in landscape, relic, or miracle - Reigate held no shrine of its own - but in function: a town along the corridor to Canterbury that built dedicated infrastructure, a chapel and a hospice, to receive people whose destination lay elsewhere. That function is now legible only through documents, principally Victoria County History's account of the Reigate parish, rather than through anything that can be touched or entered today.

To provide devotional space and physical lodging for travelers moving along the North Downs corridor toward Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury - a functional waypoint rather than a pilgrimage destination in its own right.

The chapel's site was absorbed into civic use, becoming the location of Reigate's Town Hall (rebuilt in 1728, now the Old Town Hall). The hospice's building lineage is uncertain past local tradition; if the Red Cross Inn does occupy the same plot, it has continued in a related hospitality function - as a public house - for at least the last three and a half centuries, whatever the truth of its deeper continuity.

Medieval practice at the chapel is not documented in ritual detail; presumed use would have followed standard parish devotional custom - prayer directed to St Thomas at the chapel altar - alongside the hospice's practical role of feeding and housing travelers overnight.

None at the former chapel/hospice site, which has no surviving religious function. St Mary Magdalene Church a short walk away continues ordinary Church of England parish worship within the Diocese of Southwark.

Walk the High Street stretch between the Old Town Hall and the Red Cross Inn slowly, noting how thoroughly civic and commercial use has absorbed the pilgrim-era site; then continue north to Reigate Hill to walk a stretch of the North Downs Way / Pilgrims' Way itself, where the chalk ridge and long views over the Weald offer the more embodied dimension of the route that the town centre itself no longer can.

Visiting Reigate for this history means reading a street rather than entering a building. Standing before the Old Town Hall on High Street, there is no visible trace of the chapel that historians place on this exact spot - only a Georgian civic facade going about ordinary business. A short walk to the west end of the High Street brings you to the Red Cross Inn, still trading as a pub, where the layered claim of hospice ancestry sits alongside its own more secure seventeenth-century history. Neither stop offers ruins, interpretive panels, or a marked pilgrim trail through the town itself; the Pilgrims' Way / North Downs Way proper runs along the ridge at Reigate Hill just to the north, and it is there, among chalk grassland and long views, that walkers following the old route as a contemplative practice tend to locate the more sensory, landscape-driven part of the experience. Reigate's contribution is quieter: the recognition, walking an ordinary high street, that this pavement once served people whose feet were bound for Canterbury.

Start at the Old Town Hall on High Street (site of the former chapel), walk west to the Red Cross Inn, then continue to St Mary Magdalene Church; from any of these points, Reigate Hill and the North Downs Way ridge path lie a short distance to the north.

Reigate's pilgrim history sits at an interesting angle to the popular idea of the Pilgrims' Way: it is a town that served the route without being directly on it, and its evidence is documentary rather than physical.

Historians, following Victoria County History and later local historians, generally treat the label 'Pilgrims' Way' itself as a nineteenth-century antiquarian name given to a much older North Downs trackway of prehistoric or Roman origin; actual medieval traffic toward Canterbury likely used several routes rather than one fixed path. Within that framework, Reigate's chapel and hospice are accepted as a genuine, if modestly documented, instance of a town building dedicated pilgrim infrastructure beside the ridge route rather than upon it.

Local tradition, preserved mainly through the Victoria County History and later civic memory, holds that the Red Cross Inn continues, in name and site if not in fabric, the function of the medieval pilgrim hospice - though this is offered with an explicit 'probably' rather than certainty.

At least one local account offers a competing origin story for the Red Cross Inn's name, tying it to a hospital for knights returning from the Holy Land rather than to Canterbury-bound pilgrims; this is uncorroborated by the Victoria County History and should be read as a folk-etymological alternative rather than an established fact. A further local detail - that pilgrims removed their shoes at the inn site - circulates in travel writing but is not independently confirmed.

The exact foundation date of the chapel, its architectural form, and whether the present Red Cross Inn genuinely occupies the medieval hospice's footprint or only inherited its site and reputation are all unresolved without further archaeological or documentary work; no excavation report for either building has been located.

Reigate High Street is open, pedestrian public townscape with no entry requirements. The town is served by Reigate railway station and lies on the A25, close to the M25.

No special etiquette attaches to this site beyond ordinary courtesy toward a working pub, a civic building, and a parish church.

None specified; ordinary dress is appropriate for the High Street, the Old Town Hall exterior, and the Red Cross Inn. Visitors attending a service at St Mary Magdalene Church might follow the modest, respectful dress customary at any English parish church.

Photography of the Old Town Hall and Red Cross Inn exteriors, as public buildings, is unrestricted. Inside St Mary Magdalene, standard church etiquette applies - ask before photographing during services.

None specific to the pilgrim history. The Red Cross Inn is a functioning, privately run pub and should be treated as such - a paying customer's courtesy applies, not an open heritage site's.

Continue through the atlas by country, tradition, site type, or a focused search that combines this place’s strongest context.

Sacred places within a half-day’s reach. Pilgrims often visit them together: walk one, stay for the other.

St Martha-on-the-Hill

Guildford, Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom

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Otford

Otford, Kent, United Kingdom

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St Edith's Well, Kemsing

Kemsing, Kemsing, Kent, United Kingdom

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St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England

City of London, England, United Kingdom

31.7 km away

Sources consulted when researching this page. Independent verification by readers is welcome.

1. 01Parishes: Reigate, in A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 3 — Victoria County History / British History Onlinehigh-reliability
2. 02Reigate Priory - Wikipedia — Wikipedia contributorshigh-reliability
3. 03Old Town Hall, Reigate - Wikipedia — Wikipedia contributorshigh-reliability
4. 04Reigate - Wikipedia — Wikipedia contributorshigh-reliability
5. 05Pilgrims' Way - Wikipedia — Wikipedia contributorshigh-reliability
6. 06Church of St Mary Magdalene, Non Civil Parish - List Entry 1188125 — Historic Englandhigh-reliability
7. 07Reigate Castle - Wikipedia — Wikipedia contributorshigh-reliability
8. 08Reigate - Red Cross Inn — Julian White (Walking. Gossip. Travel.)
9. 09Red Cross Inn - East and Mid Surrey CAMRA — CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale), East & Mid Surrey Branch