"Looking Around St. Paul's Cat ..." a London Travel Page by yooperprof

St. Paul's Cathedral is as much a shrine to the "idea" of Britain as it a traditional Christian cathedral. That is to say, it was conceived and executed to be as much a national monument as a religious one. The St. Paul's we see today has its origins in the Great (terrible) Fire of 1666. Targeted by the Luftwaffe in 1940, its survival was emblematic of Britain as a proud and independent nation. Its role in preserving and celebrating the British "mythos" makes it one of the two or three most important places in London.

The approach to St. Paul's walking up Ludgate Hill is magnificent. Even amidst today's hurly-burly, you can sense the way in which Wren planned the front porch of the Cathedral to be a backdrop for grand drama. You are walking uphill from the valley of the long-deceased Fleet River.

Interesting tidbit: the old St. Paul's Cathedral was a monunental Gothic pile. After it burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666, Christophen Wren submitted his plans for a new building while the ruins were still smouldering, only six days after the conflagration.

One of the greatest architectural writers in Britain was the late Tom Nairn. Listen to his paen to St. Paul's glory:

"Wren might have chosen grandeur, or drama, or _terribilita_ or excitement. Instead, there is overwhelming compassion, the common touch enobled. No wonder that cockneys love it, and see it as a badge as well as a symbol. Here once and for all the principle of English freedom has been given spiritual form: licence and variety in the parts, conforming not by order but by free will. . . It is a stupendous, encompassing achievement of balanced feeling and maturity -- and one that has come to the top again and again in this funny-shaped island just off Europe: Shakespeare's last plays, but also what England seems to have called out of people like Handel and T.S. Eliot. It is hard not to sound like a bad Churchillian parody, but in fact this is why we fought the war." [he means WWII]

"Something of the splendor of St. Paul's lies simply in its vast size, in its colorless serenity. Mind and body seem both to widen in this enclosure, to expland under this huge canopy where the light is neither daylight nor lamplight, but an ambigious element something between the two. . . Very large, very square, hollow-sounding, echoing with perpetual shuffle and booming, the Cathedral is august in the extreme, but not in the least mysterious."

Virginia Woolf, in "The London Scene"

Wren - both engineer and architect - created at St. Paul's a model for countless subsequent domes. It is 365 feet from floor to the cross atop the dome - and Wren illuminates that space with generous windows, allowing for a full appreciation of the way in which the dome seems to "float" on air.

Climbing to the top of St. Paul's dome gives you an appreciation of Christopher Wren's ingenuity in design and engineering.

From the Golden Gallery - atop the Dome

Wren is appropriately buried in the Cathedral's crypt: the words of his epitaph are a fitting, if proud, summation of Wren's life: "Beneath lies the founder of this church and city. who lived more than 90 years not for himself but for the public good. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."