St Paul's Cathedral

Timeline

1. 604

   First Cathedral Founded

   King Aethelberht of Kent builds the first wooden cathedral on the present site for Bishop Mellitus, the new bishop of the Anglo-Saxon East Saxons and seat of the Diocese of London.

2. 1087

   Third Cathedral Burns Down

   The third Saxon-era cathedral on the site is destroyed by fire. Bishop Maurice, appointed by William the Conqueror, begins the great Norman rebuilding that will become Old St Paul's.

3. 1240

   Old St Paul's Completed

   After 153 years of construction, the medieval Gothic cathedral is consecrated: 178 metres long with a central spire 149 metres high, ranking among the largest cathedrals in all of medieval Europe.

4. 1561

   Spire Destroyed by Lightning

   Lightning strikes the central spire and fire spreads across the roof. Elizabeth I's appeals for funds to rebuild the spire fall short, and only the roof is restored, leaving the cathedral truncated.

5. September 1666

   Lost in the Great Fire of London

   Old St Paul's burns to the ground over four days during the Great Fire of London, which began on Pudding Lane and consumed 13,000 houses and 87 parish churches across the medieval City.

6. 1675

   Wren's Rebuild Begins

   Charles II commissions Christopher Wren to design the new cathedral. After his Greek-cross plan is rejected by the clergy, construction begins on a revised Latin-cross plan crowned by a central dome.

7. 1710

   Present Cathedral Completed

   After thirty-five years of construction, the new St Paul's is declared finished — one of the few great buildings whose designer lived to see it completed, with Wren reportedly hauled aloft to the lantern in his old age.

8. 1805

   Funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson

   Following his death at the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson is interred in the crypt directly beneath the dome in a massive marble sarcophagus, beginning the tradition of state funerals at St Paul's.

9. 1940-41

   Survives the Blitz

   German bombing devastates the City around the cathedral, yet Herbert Mason's photograph of the dome rising above smoke and flame on 29 December 1940 becomes the defining image of British wartime resilience.

10. January 1965

    Funeral of Winston Churchill

    The state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, attended by Queen Elizabeth II and representatives of over a hundred nations, is held at the cathedral — the most watched state funeral of the twentieth century.

11. July 1981

    Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana

    The wedding of Prince Charles (later King Charles III) and Lady Diana Spencer is celebrated at the cathedral, watched by an estimated 750 million people worldwide on television.

12. 2011

    Major Restoration Completed

    A 15-year programme of exterior cleaning and stone repair, the largest restoration in the cathedral's history, finishes — revealing the pale Portland stone for the first time in over 300 years.

Detailed History

The history of St Paul's Cathedral begins in AD 604, when King Aethelberht of Kent founded the first wooden cathedral on Ludgate Hill as the seat of Mellitus, the newly consecrated bishop to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Saxons. That original church burned down. A second, stone cathedral built in the late seventh century was sacked by Vikings in the tenth century; a third Saxon cathedral burned again in 1087. Bishop Maurice, appointed by William the Conqueror, began the great medieval rebuilding that culminated in 1240 with the completion of Old St Paul's: a Gothic colossus 178 metres long, with a central spire reaching 149 metres above the ground — one of the largest cathedrals in medieval Europe. Lightning destroyed the spire in 1447 and again in 1561; Elizabeth I's restoration only managed the roof. By the seventeenth century the cathedral was in serious disrepair, and Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren had each prepared proposals to remodel it in a hybrid Gothic-Baroque manner. Then, on 2 September 1666, the Great Fire of London broke out in Pudding Lane, raged for four days, and consumed Old St Paul's together with 13,000 houses and 87 parish churches. Charles II commissioned Wren to design the replacement. Wren's first preferred design was a Greek-cross plan with a central dome, in the spirit of the Roman Pantheon, but the cathedral chapter rejected it as too foreign in feeling; he was forced to revise toward the traditional English Latin-cross plan. Construction began in 1675 and the cathedral was declared complete in 1710, after thirty-five years of work — one of the few great buildings whose designer lived to see it finished, with Wren reportedly hoisted to the lantern in his old age. From the funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson in 1805, to the Duke of Wellington in 1852, to Winston Churchill in 1965, and Margaret Thatcher in 2013, the cathedral has served as the stage for the great state funerals of modern British history. The wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer on 29 July 1981 was watched by an estimated 750 million people worldwide. During the Blitz of 1940-41, German bombing devastated the surrounding City but the dome miraculously survived — Herbert Mason's photograph of St Paul's standing in the smoke became the defining image of British wartime resilience, prompting Churchill's order to save the cathedral 'at all costs'.

Cultural Significance

St Paul's Cathedral is a Grade I listed building, England's highest tier of historical protection. As the seat of the Bishop of London in the Church of England, it stands at the spiritual heart of the City of London. Where Westminster Abbey is the royal church, St Paul's is by long tradition 'the people's cathedral': the venue chosen for events that engage the wider nation rather than the royal household alone. The St Paul's Heights policy, introduced in the 1930s, restricts the height and bulk of new buildings within designated viewing corridors so that the dome retains its primacy on the skyline — a planning principle that still shapes London's high-rise development today. During the Blitz of December 1940, while the City around it was reduced to rubble, the dome rose above the smoke in Herbert Mason's celebrated photograph 'St Paul's Survives', which became the iconic image of British wartime defiance and a fixture in collective national memory. State occasions from the 1981 royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer to the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 and the Diamond Jubilee thanksgiving service for Elizabeth II in 2012 anchor the cathedral firmly in modern Britain's civic life. Its cinematic presence is equally rich — from the 'Feed the Birds' set in Mary Poppins to countless Blitz-era films.

Architectural Details

The present cathedral, a definitive monument of the English Baroque, measures 157 metres long, 74 metres wide, and rises 111 metres to the top of its dome. Wren retained the English Latin-cross plan but crowned the crossing with a triple-shell dome: an outer lead-clad timber shell for visual effect, a brick cone in the middle bearing the load of the lantern, and an inner hemispherical shell frescoed by James Thornhill. The arrangement combined lightness with monumentality and remains a celebrated feat of structural engineering. The west front rises in a two-tier colonnade — Corinthian below, Composite above — flanked by paired bell towers that introduced, for the first time in an English cathedral, the rhythmical Baroque movement of Roman Counter-Reformation churches Wren had studied through engravings. The pediment carving by Francis Bird depicts Paul's conversion at Damascus, with a statue of Saint Paul at the apex. Inside, the choir woodwork is by Grinling Gibbons, whose deeply carved oak panels in fruit and foliage catch the clerestory light. Beneath the dome, the Whispering Gallery is famous for an acoustic curiosity: a soft whisper against the curved wall is audible 30 metres away. The lantern, ball, and cross weigh roughly 770 tonnes.