St Paul's

St Paul's from Paternoster Square

We finally managed to get along to St Paul's recently, which is pretty bad of us, since it's such a dominant feature in London.  We bought our tickets online (the only way to do it), though to be honest there was almost no line anyway.  We did manage to get there fairly early, and the Europeans never seem to get out the door before 10am, perhaps that helped.

Your ticket comes with an audio guide, which was pretty good.  I think I would have preferred a little more history and architecture though, it seemed to focus fairly heavily on the religious aspects.  Unfortunately no photos were allowed inside the cathedral, which is a shame, it is a really nice building, and the crypts were a bit of a highlight.

In the 1666 great fire, St Paul's was almost completely destroyed, so the man of London, Christopher Wren, was tasked with rebuilding it.  The 'new' version is quite different from the old, in that the original version was much smaller and much more gothic.  What really stands out is of course the dome, which at 110m high, comes in behind only St Paul's in Rome.  It's a double shell dome, in that the massive creation you see is a shell around a smaller cone in the middle.  So when you climb up to the very top, you are actually climbing right up between the two shells.

Paternoster Square, from the top of St Paul's

View of the city from the top of St Paul's

Probably one of the more famous features of St Paul's is the whispering gallery, again up in the dome, the idea is that if you speak into the wall the person opposite you will be able to hear you as if you were next to them.  It was pretty freaky, but it's not all that easy to achieve, you really have to be standing the right way and speaking into the correct part of the wall and speaking at the correct volume.  Luckily there was a tour guide up there at the time who took pity on us and showed us how to do it.  It is pretty cool once you get it working.

The crypts are also really good.  Some of the tombs down there were caught in the fire, so are partially blackened.  Lord Nelsons tomb is one of the best, the tomb is actually one that Cardinal Wolsey had made for himself.  But when he feel out of favour with Henry VIII the grand sarcophagus went into storage.

It is kind of expensive to visit, at about 15 pounds per person. I always find it strange to have to pay to visit a church, but I guess they need the money to help in the upkeep.  It must have been doubly hard for the clergy during the Occupy protests, since they set up literally right outside St Paul's.  By doing so they were deterring

View from St Paul's across to the Tate Modern

tourists visiting the cathedral, but then the church couldn't be seen to be sticking the boot into the protesters, who were ostensibly sticking up for the poor.  That led to a few resignations amongst the clergy as they tried to answer the question, What Would Jesus Do?

What is also really weird is the square right next to St Paul's, literally adjoining it, Paternoster Square, is actually owned by a private company, and there is no public right of way through it.  Pretty weird, since public right of ways seem to exist almost everywhere else, but not through something right in the middle of the city.  This means that the Occupy protesters really had no chance of occupying this square, even though this was really their target, since the London Stock Exchange is in one of the buildings facing the square.