Christopher Wren's St Paul's,
one of the best-loved buildings in the United Kingdom.

St Paul’s

In 1668, Christopher Wren was commissioned to build the new cathedral of St Paul's after the old cathedral burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666. A cathedral had stood on the site since AD 604, and the Norman cathedral which had been destroyed had taken more than two hundred years to build. Wren planned to build a new St Paul's at lightning speed.

Trying to get it right

Born in 1632, Wren was an astronomer and mathematician, a founder of the Royal Society, and a self-taught architect. He worked with brilliance and verve, but his first design was rejected. He went back to his drawing board. In 1673 his second plan and Great Model for the cathedral were abandoned. He would rebuild more than fifty churches all over London, but he could not seem to get St Paul's right.

Finally in 1675 his third design was approved, and construction began. The design was sensational.

The cathedral was to be built in the shape of a cross, with the dome rising above the intersection of the arms - the crossroads. It would be one of the largest cathedral domes in the world, 364 feet high and 65,000 tons in weight.

To pull off this feat, Wren placed three domes inside each other. Edward Rutherfurd writes in London -

"Between the domed ceiling seen from the interior and the metalled exterior roof which rises fifty feet higher, there was, not exactly a dome, but a massive brick cone, almost like a kiln." That cone supports the lantern on top and holds everything else in place as well. Around the base of the dome is a great double chain and all the way up the inner cone are bands of stone and iron chains "which hold everything tight, like the metal hoops round a barrel." Eight great pillars support the dome.

Wren, by then in his seventies, used to be pulled up in a basket every week so he could inspect progress.

The Whispering Gallery runs round the interior of the dome. It acquired its name when it was realized that a whisper against its walls was audible on the opposite side of the dome. The measurements of the dome are so precise and the air so still that the Royal Society planned to test Newton's theory of gravity here.

Looking up into St Paul's dome.

A sea of carvings

The first service in St Paul's was held on 2 December 1697 in the Quire, the part of the building where construction began. This is where the wood carvings of Grinling Gibbons can be seen – "a sea of carving. . .Spreading leaves and sinuous vines, flowers, trumpets, cherubic heads, festoons of fruit. . ." (London) "There is no instance of a man before Gibbons who gave wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers" (Horace Walpole) - or the softness of a sleeping child. Gibbons and his assistants carved several tons of oak with the greatest delicacy and inventiveness.

St. Paul's survived Nazi German bombing in World War II.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 3:13

Photo Credit: U.S. National Archives, 306-NT-3173V

Men from America remembered

At the east end of the Cathedral, behind the High Altar, part of St Paul's was destroyed during the Blitz. It was funded and rebuilt in the 1950s to commemorate the members of the United States forces based in Britain who gave their lives defending liberty during World War II. It is called the American Memorial Chapel.

There has been a choir of boys and men at St Paul’s for over nine centuries. Evensong is sung every day. On Sundays there are three choral services - Matins, Eucharist and Evensong.

Image: St Paul's Cathedral

Christopher Wren died on the 25th of February 1723. He was buried in the crypt of his cathedral. His son wrote him one of the most famous epitaphs of all time -

"Lector, Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice" - Reader, if you seek his monument, look around.

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