Most visitors to England’s historic Canterbury Cathedral are drawn to the building’s stunning English Gothic architectural features, or its venerable thousand-year history. But apparently, some tourists have an entirely different agenda in mind when visiting the sixth-century world heritage site: streaming porn.
According to the London Evening Standard, managers at the Canterbury Cathedral are implementing blocks to prevent visitors from accessing adult content on public Wi-Fi, which was made available at the cathedral’s newly opened coffee shop. The move was apparently prompted by a neighboring cathedral being forced to shut down its Wi-Fi after it was discovered that patrons were also using it to surf hardcore porn sites.
“It’s really a safeguarding process,” Christopher Robinson, a spokesperson for the Canterbury Cathedral, told the Evening Standard. “What we wanted is to provide free Wi-Fi for members of the public, but we didn’t want salacious or debasing sites being accessed.”
Apparently, coffee shop patrons accessing porn on public Wi-Fi is a fairly common problem in the U.K. A study by a mobile security firm estimates that nearly one third of restaurants and cafes do not put restrictions on their Wi-Fi.
But the question remains: Why the hell would someone feel compelled to access a “salacious or debasing” site at a historic church in the first place? Unless you’re an architecture porn aficionado, it’s difficult to conceive what one could find arousing about the glistening stained glass windows, or the majestic perpendicular style nave, or the giant phallic bell towers, their spires thrusting triumphantly into the sky… OK, yeah, actually, I totally understand why they’re putting the blocks up. Carry on, Canterbury Cathedral.
H/T London Evening Standard | Photo by Londonguide8/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
