St Paul's Cathedral

• 1. Introduction

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  St Paul's Cathedral stands on Ludgate Hill at the highest point of the City of London, and it has occupied that ground, in one form or another, since AD 604. The dome that Christopher Wren completed in 1710 rises 365 feet to a cross at its summit, a height Wren chose deliberately because of his interest in astronomy. For more than three centuries, that dome has watched over the city below it, surviving the Blitz, radical religious politics, suffragette bombs, and the debates of a changing nation. How did a single hilltop site become the stage for so much of English history? And who were the people who built, destroyed, rebuilt, and fought over this place across fourteen centuries?

• 2. The Hill Before Wren

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  Æthelberht, the king of Kent, built the first church dedicated to St Paul on Ludgate Hill around AD 604, as a seat for Mellitus, the first bishop to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Saxons. That early foundation was fragile. When the East Saxon king Sæberht died around 616, his pagan sons expelled Mellitus and the nascent congregation, and the fate of that first building is simply not known. Christianity returned to the East Saxons later in the seventh century, and a new bishop named Erkenwald left such a mark on the place that he was buried there in 693 and came to be venerated almost as a second founder. King Æthelred the Unready was buried in the cathedral in 1016; his tomb is now lost. A fire in 1087 destroyed much of the city alongside the cathedral, and the Normans began an entirely new structure on the same site after that disaster. That Norman rebuilding took so long that the architectural fashions shifted midway through construction, which is why the upper parts and east end of what became known as Old St Paul's show the pointed arches and larger windows of the Gothic style rather than the Romanesque forms the Normans had started with. By the later medieval period, the building was enormous: Francis Penrose's excavations in 1878 established that it had been 585 feet long and 100 feet wide, with a spire reaching about 489 feet, exceeded in height at the time only by Lincoln Cathedral and St Mary's Church in Stralsund. The English Reformation under Henry VIII and Edward VI then stripped the interior of its chapels, shrines, and a reliquary collection that claimed, among other things, to hold the skull of Thomas Becket, the head of John the Baptist, and the milk of the Virgin Mary. In October 1538, an image of St Erkenwald was delivered to the master of the king's jewels. A workman died in November 1547 when items fell on him during the iconoclasm of Edward VI's reign. In 1550, the high altar was removed overnight and destroyed, an act that provoked a fight in which another man was killed. A lightning strike destroyed the famous spire in 1561, and the cost of proper repairs was more than a city recovering from trade depression could bear. Inigo Jones designed a new classical west portico in 1631, but work on it was still unfinished when the Civil War began in 1642. Parliament ordered the cathedral used as a cavalry barracks; by 1658 the south transept had collapsed and parts of the roof were missing. King Charles II established a royal commission in 1663 to address the ruin, and one of the commissioners was a young professor of astronomy named Christopher Wren, who submitted proposals in May 1666 for a radical renovation. Three months later, the Great Fire of London settled the question for everyone.

• 3. Wren's Long Argument

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  On the 30th of July 1669, the task of designing a completely new cathedral was officially assigned to Wren. The process that followed was less an orderly commission than a prolonged negotiation between an architect of unusually strong convictions and a committee of clergy with equally strong ones. Wren produced five distinct general stages of design before arriving at what was actually built. His first model was rejected as not stately enough. His second, a Greek cross plan, was judged by the clerics as failing to meet the requirements of Anglican liturgy. His third design, embodied in the Great Model of 1673, was his personal favourite, a form he considered a reflection of Renaissance beauty. The model, made of oak and plaster, cost more than £500 and stands more than 13 feet tall and 21 feet long; it still survives inside the cathedral today. The clerics rejected it too, partly because the eight central piers supporting the dome meant the entire building would have to be completed all at once, rather than opened in stages as was the English custom. After that rebuff, Wren resolved never to make further models and never to expose his drawings publicly, which he said did nothing but lose time and subject his work to incompetent judges. His fourth design, the Warrant Design, finally received a royal warrant for rebuilding, but it came with a crucial clause: Wren was permitted to make any further ornamental changes he deemed necessary. He took full advantage of that permission across the thirty years of construction. In July 1668, Dean William Sancroft had written to Wren that the Archbishop of Canterbury wanted a cathedral that was "handsome and noble to all the ends of it and to the reputation of the City and the nation." The final building was financed by a tax on coal. The date of the first stone is disputed, with contemporary accounts placing it on either the 21st, the 25th, or the 28th of June 1675, though there is general agreement it was laid in June 1675 by Thomas Strong, one of Wren's two master stonemasons. The topping-out ceremony, when the final stone was placed on the lantern, took place on the 26th of October 1708, performed by Wren's son Christopher Jr and the son of one of the masons. Parliament declared the cathedral officially complete on the 25th of December 1711, though statues were still being added to the roof in the 1720s. Total costs by 1716 came to £1,095,556.

• 4. The Triple Dome

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  Visitors looking up into the dome of St Paul's from the nave floor are not seeing the structure as it actually exists. What appears to be a single soaring shell is in fact three separate constructions stacked inside each other, a feat of structural invention that solved a problem Michelangelo had not fully resolved at St Peter's Basilica in Rome. Wren needed a dome that would look magnificent from outside the building and read as a great landmark on the London skyline, while also presenting a satisfying and humanly scaled interior space when seen from below. A dome tall enough to command the City would appear oppressively high and distant from inside. Wren's answer was to draft both the inner and outer domes as catenary curves, separating their heights to a much greater degree than Michelangelo had done, so that each appears correct from its respective vantage point. Between the two visible domes, he inserted a brick cone, 18 inches thick, which carries both the heavy stone lantern above and the timbers of the outer lead-covered dome. The cone is supported at intervals by wrought iron chains embedded in the brickwork, and further chains ring the cornice of the peristyle of the inner dome to prevent spreading and cracking. The lantern sitting on top of all of this weighs approximately 850 tons. Wren solved a second problem specific to London's geology by designing the crypt, now the largest in Europe, to run under the entire building rather than just the eastern end. The crypt serves a structural function: its massive piers spread the weight of the slimmer piers of the church above across the weak clay soil of the site. While most cathedral domes rest on four piers, Wren used eight, achieving a broader distribution at the foundation level. The Whispering Gallery, where a whisper against the wall at any point is audible to a listener with an ear to the wall anywhere else around the circle, runs at 99 feet above the floor and is reached by 259 steps from ground level. The dome itself rises from 173 feet to 214 feet at the painted interior surface, decorated by Sir James Thornhill with eight scenes from the life of St Paul in illusionistic architecture.

• 5. Craftsmen and Their Marks

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  Nicholas Hawksmoor joined Wren as his principal assistant in 1684 and remained involved for the duration. Joshua Marshall was appointed one of the two original master masons, but he died early in 1678; his place was taken by Thomas Strong and his brother Edward, who saw the construction through to the end. John Langland served as master carpenter for more than thirty years. Grinling Gibbons was the chief sculptor, working in stone on the exterior, including the pediment of the north portal, and in wood on the internal fittings. The art historian John Summerson described Gibbons as having astonishing facility and suggested his ambition in wood was to reproduce the effect of Dutch flower painting in three dimensions. Caius Gabriel Cibber carved the pediment of the south transept, while Francis Bird was responsible for the relief on the west pediment depicting the Conversion of St Paul, as well as the seven large statues on the west front. Jean Tijou, a French metalworker, provided the elaborate wrought iron and gilt grilles, gates, and balustrades; many of his pieces have since been combined into the gates near the sanctuary. The floor was paved in black and white marble by William Dickinson in 1709-10. The ball and cross on the dome were provided by an armourer named Andrew Niblett. The original iron churchyard railings, designed by Wren himself and installed in 1714 on a Portland stone base, had a curious later history: in the 1870s the surveyor Francis Penrose had them lowered and eventually removed from the west forecourt. A civic official named John George Howard purchased the surplus railings and had them shipped to Toronto, where he was the municipal surveyor. The ship carrying them sank in the St Lawrence River and had to be salvaged at Howard's expense, but the railings eventually came to rest on his tomb in High Park, his former estate.

• 6. Bombs, Bells, and Resistance

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  On the 8th of May 1913, a bomb made partly from a mustard tin and packed with potassium nitrate was discovered ticking in the cathedral as people were entering for a sermon. Had it detonated, it would likely have destroyed the historic bishop's throne. It was the first of two suffragette attacks on the building; a second device was found on the 13th of June 1914, two days after a bomb at Westminster Abbey had damaged the Coronation Chair. Between 1913 and 1914, suffragettes from the Women's Social and Political Union attacked 32 churches across Britain, targeting the Church of England as an institution they believed was reinforcing opposition to women's suffrage. The remains of the 1913 device are now on display at the City of London Police Museum. Twenty-seven years later, the cathedral faced a very different threat. On the 12th of September 1940, a time-delayed bomb that had struck the building was defused and removed by a Royal Engineers bomb disposal detachment under Temporary Lieutenant Robert Davies. Had it detonated, it would have destroyed the cathedral entirely; it left a crater 100 feet wide when later detonated in a secure location. Davies and Sapper George Cameron Wylie were each awarded the George Cross. The cathedral was nonetheless struck twice during the Blitz: on the 10th of October 1940, destroying the high altar, and on the 17th of April 1941, when a bomb hit the north transept with enough force to shift the entire dome laterally by a small amount. The most famous image from those years is a photograph taken on the 29th of December 1940 by Herbert Mason from the roof of a building in Tudor Street, showing the dome rising through smoke during the Second Great Fire of London. Winston Churchill, according to the writer Lisa Jardine, telephoned the Guildhall at the height of that particular raid to insist that all fire-fighting resources be directed at St Paul's. Earlier in the 20th century, structural concerns had prompted an appeal for £70,000 to reinforce two of the piers, with work delayed by the First World War. A second appeal for £100,000 in 1922 continued the work, but on Christmas Eve 1924 a Dangerous Structures Notice was served on the cathedral by the City Corporation. Starting in March 1925, concrete and more than 250 steel bars were inserted into the piers, and a great steel chain was embedded around the outside of the dome. A rededication service on the 25th of June 1930, attended by King George V and Queen Mary, was the first service broadcast from the cathedral on BBC Radio.

• 7. Tombs, Music, and Memory

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  Christopher Wren was the first person interred in the crypt, in 1723. On the wall above his tomb, visitors can read a Latin inscription that translates as: "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you." The tomb of Horatio Nelson sits in the crypt next to that of the Duke of Wellington, and Nelson's marble sarcophagus was originally made for Cardinal Wolsey, who fell from favour before he could use it. The largest monument in the cathedral is Wellington's, by Alfred Stevens; it stands on the north side of the nave and was planned from the outset to include an equestrian figure, but objections to having a horse inside the church delayed the installation of the statue of Wellington astride his horse Copenhagen until 1912, with the horse and rider carved by John Tweed. John Donne, the poet and Dean of St Paul's, posed for his own memorial statue before his death and was depicted by Nicholas Stone wrapped in a burial shroud, standing on a funeral urn. That sculpture, carved around 1630, is the only one from the cathedral to survive the Great Fire of 1666 intact. Henry Moore carved a limestone Madonna and Child for the north choir aisle in 1943. A robbery on the 22nd of December 1810 took almost all of the remaining precious artefacts from the treasury. The choir's earliest records date from 1127, and the choir historically consisted of up to 30 boy choristers, eight probationers, and twelve professional male singers. In February 2017, the cathedral announced the first female vicar choral, a mezzo-soprano named Carris Jones. In 2022, St Paul's announced it would admit girls to the choir, breaking a tradition stretching back 900 years. On the 30th of June 2024, two girls formally joined as full choristers, with the Sunday Choral Evensong service marking the occasion. Among the notable musicians associated with the choir over the centuries are the composers John Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, Maurice Greene, and John Stainer, as well as the poet Walter de la Mare, who was a chorister there. The Grand Organ, completed in 1872, is the fifth-largest in Great Britain by number of pipes, containing 7,256 pipes across 136 ranks and 137 stops, principally housed in a case designed in Wren's workshop and decorated by Grinling Gibbons. Great Paul, the great bell of the southwest tower, was cast in 1881 and was the largest bell in the British Isles until the casting of the Olympic Bell for the 2012 London Olympics; in the 1970s its clapper mechanism fractured and sent parts crashing through the clock mechanism below at a repair cost of £30,000, and the bell did not ring again until the 31st of July 2021, when it was hand-swung during the London Festival of the Bells.