St Paul’s Cathedral
After the Great Fire of 1666 Wren was commissioned to redesign many of London’s churches. The dome of St Paul’s is actually three: an inner dome, a brick cone that carries the lantern and an outer dome of timber and lead. The cathedral was declared complete in 1711 and was for a long time the tallest building in London.
The medieval cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Christopher Wren, who was an astronomer and mathematician before he became an architect, was commissioned to design a new one. His first proposal was a centrally planned church in the form of a Greek cross, and a large model of it survives, but the clergy wanted a traditional longitudinal church. The plan approved in 1675 gave Wren freedom to make changes as work progressed, and he changed a great deal. The foundation stone was laid in 1675 and the cathedral was declared complete in 1711. The building was financed partly by a tax on coal brought into London. It is built of Portland stone, a pale limestone from southern England. Wren himself is buried in the crypt.
The plan is a Latin cross with a dome over the crossing. The aisles are low, but from outside this is concealed by tall screen walls at the upper level, which also hide the flying buttresses. The dome consists of three parts: the inner dome, which gives a well-proportioned space from inside, a brick cone that carries the heavy lantern, and the outer dome of timber and lead, which creates the tall silhouette. Inside the dome runs the Whispering Gallery, where sound carries around the wall. The west front has a two-storey portico with paired Corinthian columns and two towers with Baroque forms. The furnishings include carved choir stalls by Grinling Gibbons and ironwork by Jean Tijou, and the dome has grisaille paintings by James Thornhill.
During the German bombing of London in 1940–1941 the cathedral was hit but was saved by volunteer fire-watchers, and the image of the dome rising above the smoke became a symbol of the city’s resilience. A bomb damaged the east end, and after the war the high altar was replaced by a new baldacchino altar. Nelson and Wellington are among those buried in the crypt. The cathedral has been the setting for state funerals, such as Churchill’s in 1965, and royal weddings. Between the 1990s and the 2010s the façades and interior were cleaned. Views of the dome are still protected by regulations on tall buildings in London. Wren’s dome became the model for many later domes, including the Panthéon in Paris and the Capitol in Washington, and it showed how English Baroque could unite classical order with Gothic engineering.