St Paul's Cathedral

The designs Wren did not build

Four schemes preceded the cathedral. A first model was approved in May 1670 and rejected as not stately enough. A Greek cross design followed, which Charles II approved late in 1672. From it came the Great Model design, for which the king asked in December 1672 for a model so large that a man might stand inside it; William Cleere built it between September 1673 and October 1674, over twenty feet long and four metres high at a scale of one to twenty-five, in oak, plaster and lime wood. That scheme was rejected too. The design actually authorised, by royal warrant of 14 May 1675, is the fourth, and work began within days.

Older accounts say the approved design called for no dome and that Wren smuggled one in under a licence to make ornamental changes. Both halves need correcting. The Warrant Design did show a dome, carrying a tall steeple above it, so what Wren altered was the kind of dome rather than its existence. And the famous licence — a liberty to make variations rather ornamental than essential — comes from the memoir his family published in 1750, not from the warrant, whose own wording calls the approved model a perpetual and unchangeable rule. The Great Model itself survives in the cathedral's collection.

The dome

What looks like one dome is three layers doing three different jobs. The outer dome, the one visible across London, is a timber frame covered in lead, and it carries no load but its own. Inside, below it, is a shallower masonry dome seen from the floor of the church. Between the two stands a brick cone just a foot and a half thick, hooped with a wrought-iron chain at its base, and it is the cone, with the canted inner drum, that takes the weight of the stone lantern above and carries it down into the piers of the crypt. Wren added iron chains in the early 1690s, began the drum in January 1696, and after 1702 thickened the cone and tied it into the base of the inner dome so that it could support a heavier lantern than first intended. The external drum is a hundred and forty feet across. The inner dome was painted by Sir James Thornhill.

The lantern's weight is often given as eight hundred and fifty tons. That figure appears in no authoritative source — the cathedral's own technical accounts give the cone's thickness and the load paths and no weights at all — so it is better left out.

Thirty-five years

Old St Paul's burned in the Great Fire of September 1666. Nine years passed before building began in 1675. The first service was held in the quire in 1697, the last stone was laid on the lantern in October 1708, and Parliament declared the cathedral complete on 25 December 1711 — thirty-five years of construction, and the date the institution itself uses. It is listed Grade I and has been since January 1950. Among the things the listing records and visitors usually miss: Wren's library and music room above the west chapels, the geometric staircase in the south-west tower, and Lutyens's wrought-iron lamp standards at the west front.

The galleries

Three galleries are open to climb, by stairs only. The Whispering Gallery, inside the dome at triforium level, is two hundred and fifty-seven steps up — not the two hundred and fifty-nine of older accounts, which is a figure the cathedral itself does not use. The Stone Gallery, outside at the base of the dome, is three hundred and seventy-six, and the Golden Gallery, at the foot of the lantern, five hundred and twenty-eight.

The whispering effect is real and is a property of the circular wall: a sound made close to it travels round the curve rather than across the space, so a whisper against the stone on one side is audible against the stone on the other. It works best when nobody else is attempting it, which is seldom.

Nelson, Wellington, Donne and Wren

Nelson and Wellington are both buried in the crypt, Wellington beside Nelson — their funerals were in January 1806 and November 1852 — and the places older accounts give for them are the positions of their monuments rather than their graves. Nelson's monument, by John Flaxman, is in the south transept. Wellington's, by Alfred Stevens, stands in a bay of the nave on the north side; it was moved to that position in 1892 and the equestrian group on top was finished by John Tweed decades after Stevens's death. Churchill's state funeral was held here in 1965, and the cathedral has seen only three: his, Nelson's and Wellington's.

John Donne was Dean from November 1621, and his monument is the best thing in the building for a reason older accounts miss. Nicholas Stone carved it within eighteen months of Donne's death in March 1631, working from a study for which Donne posed in his burial shroud, and it is the one monument from Old St Paul's to come through the Great Fire substantially intact. It stood among salvaged fragments in the crypt for much of its later life and was moved in the late nineteenth century to its present place south of the choir.

Wren was buried in the crypt in 1723. The inscription on the wall above his tomb was composed by his son: Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice — reader, if you seek his monument, look about you.

The war

Older accounts say nothing about the thing the building is best known for outside architecture, which is that it survived. The cathedral had its own volunteer fire brigade, the St Paul's Watch, first raised in 1915 against Zeppelins and reinstated in 1939 under the Surveyor to the Fabric. More than three hundred volunteers served — clergy, cathedral staff, retired architects recruited through a professional appeal, and local residents — on duty every night of the war, with a post in the triforium connected by telephone to the dome, the crypt and the fire brigade, and a first-aid station in the crypt staffed largely by women. An incendiary lodged in the roof timbers had to be found and smothered with sand within about ten minutes. The Watch dealt with fires from more than sixty bombs over the course of the war and stood down in 1945; a memorial to it is set in the floor before the west doors.

Three dates account for the near misses and the hits. On 12 September 1940 a large delayed-action bomb buried itself near the west steps; Royal Engineers took three days to get it out, and the officer and sapper who did it received the George Cross, which had been instituted days before. On 10 October 1940 a high-explosive bomb struck the east end and destroyed the high altar. On 16 April 1941 another came through over the north transept. And on the night of 29 December 1940, during the raid that became known as the second great fire of London, Herbert Mason photographed the dome standing clear above the smoke from the roof of a newspaper office — the picture published as "St Paul's Survives".

The restoration that is finished

Between the mid-1990s and June 2011 the cathedral was cleaned and repaired inside and out for the first time in its history: the Portland stone of the exterior, the carving and sculpture, the west front, the interior stonework and the mosaics. It cost about forty million pounds, ran roughly fifteen years, and was timed to finish for the tercentenary. The scaffolding came down in 2011. Accounts describing the work as current, and recommending a visit on that basis, are describing something that ended fifteen years ago.

Later work inside

The quire mosaics by William Blake Richmond date from the 1890s and early 1900s. A further campaign of repair ran from 1924 to 1930. The American Memorial Chapel behind the high altar, built in the bomb-damaged east end, was completed in 1958, with its apse windows two years later. Henry Moore's Mother and Child, carved in 1943, stands in the north quire aisle, and two video works by Bill Viola are on long loan from the Tate — Martyrs in the south quire aisle from 2014 and Mary in the north from 2016. A memorial space called Remember Me, for those who died of covid, opened in the north transept in July 2022.

The approach

St Paul's station is the nearest. The approach worth taking, though, is from the south. The Millennium Bridge, by Foster and Partners with Ove Arup and the sculptor Anthony Caro, opened on 10 June 2000, shut within days because it swayed sideways underfoot, and reopened in February 2002 once it had been damped. Its northern landing at Peter's Hill is aligned so that the walk up from Tate Modern on Bankside holds the dome dead ahead the whole way.

A ticket is needed for sightseeing from Monday to Saturday; attending a service is free. The streets immediately north of the cathedral are being rebuilt — the gyratory is being redesigned and a new public square laid out — with the work expected to finish in the middle of 2027.