St Paul's Cathedral: Look Around You
Why is it significant?
Come out of Cheapside and stop as the dome of St Paul's Cathedral fills the sky in front of you, grey-white against the clouds, with its golden ball and cross on top. For more than two hundred and fifty years nothing in London stood taller than that cross.
Key Facts
| Place | St Paul's Cathedral: Look Around You |
|---|---|
| Address | St Paul's Cathedral, St Paul's Churchyard, London EC4M 8AD, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51380, -0.09850 |
| Part of Walk | London Burning: The Great Fire of 1666 and Wren's Phoenix City, from the Tower to St Paul's |
| Generated | Generated |
Come out of Cheapside and stop as the dome of St Paul's Cathedral fills the sky in front of you, grey-white against the clouds, with its golden ball and cross on top. For more than two hundred and fifty years nothing in London stood taller than that cross. This is where the story of the Fire ends... and where Christopher Wren's life's work is crowned.
Old St Paul's, the medieval cathedral, was even longer than this one. In 1666 the booksellers of the neighbourhood thought its stone walls were safe and stuffed their stock into the crypt. On the third night of the fire the scaffolding caught, the roof caught, and the paper below turned the church into a furnace. Witnesses wrote that the molten lead from the roof ran down the streets like a river.
Wren was thirty-three when the city burned. His first designs for a new cathedral were rejected by the clergy as too strange, too foreign. So he got approval for a safer design, with a clause allowing him to make ornamental changes... and then quietly built something very different. Legend says that when the centre of the dome was being marked out, a workman brought a fragment of an old gravestone from the rubble. Carved on it was one Latin word, Resurgam, I shall rise again. You can see that word under a phoenix on the south side of the cathedral.
The dome is really three: an inner dome you see from inside, a hidden brick cone that holds up the heavy stone lantern, and an outer dome of timber and lead that you see from the street. The cathedral was declared complete in 1711, when Wren was nearly eighty. He died in 1723, at ninety, and lies in the crypt under a plain black slab. Above it, the Latin says: reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.
And the story did not end in 1666. On the night of the 29th of December 1940, the Blitz set the City ablaze again, and volunteers of the St Paul's Watch fought the fire bombs on the roof. The photograph of this dome rising above the smoke became a symbol of a city that would not burn down twice. So, at the end of this walk, do as Wren asks. Look around you.