The hotel we stayed in was extremely well-located, right next door to the cathedral gateway. Most of the rooms are above shops down the street, and there's a shaky rooftop walk from the reception to get there. Because there aren't actual floors that can be numbered, the rooms have names: the one we were in is called "Twilight". That was our first warning sign.
The second was that the hotel supplied earplugs. It turns out that there's no air conditioning (so you want the windows open) and no double glazing (so you can hear street sounds even when the windows are closed). We were awoken by ransom teenagers until about 12:30am, then it switched to vehicles thundering down the street over cobblestones at hourly intervals. Bins were emptied in the noisiest way possible, random people shouted "hello" at 3:20am, and trucks reversed with a beep-beep noise.
Opposite our room is a shop selling fine art. It's impressive how many people will deride its prices in a loud voice when the world outside is otherwise silent.
I could have used the earplugs, and almost did at 3pm the next day when a saxophonist played in the small square outside for three hours straight. There was no point in using them overnight, though, because I wasn't going to get much sleep anyway on account of the streetlight immediately outside the window. Maybe if it had been covered with blackout blinds I'd have been OK, but it wasn't.
The windows are not only incapable of keeping sound out, by the way, but also insects of the kind that are attracted to streetlights.
The floors in the hotel aren't exactly perpendicular to the vertical, becuase they're so old. The bed was therefore not flat, possessing a slight slope of perhaps 3 or 4 degrees from left side to right side. It's not a lot, sure, but it's strangely noticeable.
Oh, and the TV was unable to display any pictures without spewing digitally-patchy square artefacts all over it, except for the QVC shopping channel.
Still, the continental breakfast was very good, and at least I wasn't awoken by a tamper-proof smoke alarm every 10 minutes like I was that time I stayed in Comfort, Texas.
Canterbury itself is quite nice. It's like Colchester, except with a cathedral instead of a castle and shops instead of coffee outlets.