St Paul's – the 300-year-old church with 1400 years of history

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St Paul’s Cathedral: 1400 Years at the Heart of London

By Ann Saunders

St Paul’s, for all its magnificence, is not the church of royalty: that is Westminster Abbey; or the main church of the Church of England: that is Canterbury cathedral. It belongs to the people of the City of London, England’s centre of banking and trade.

The first church was built on the site in the 7th century to serve the reviving Anglo-Saxon city, hence the 1400 years of the subtitle. Then in the 11th century the Normans started the building of a large stone structure with a spire which rose to 149m, 38m higher than the current dome. Under the Tudors this mediaeval church went into decline. Henry VIII gambled away the bells, and the spire collapsed. James I tried to start a renovation process but nothing much happened until Charles I appointed Inigo Jones. He clad the mediaeval church in Portland stone and built a grand new Corinthian portico.

During the Civil War, London was anti-royalist. The church became a cavalry barracks and the wood that Inigo Jones had collected for the scaffolding was sold to pay for armaments. In 1660, after the Restoration, Charles II appointed Christopher Wren, then Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University, to take charge of a further effort in renovation. Wren had visited Paris and seen the dome of the Sorbonne, and proposed one to replace the now spireless and ramshackle tower. Six days after getting agreement to this proposal the Great Fire consumed the church and most of London, making a rebuild necessary.

Anne Saunders gives us a brief history of Wren the man, and the development of his plans for the new church, with its dome and a portico based on Inigo Jones’ earlier design. Wren had a large wood and plaster model made, on a one-in-eight scale, almost four metres high, so that the King and others could get a feel for the interior of the building. The foundation stone was laid, without ceremony, in 1675. After many trials, not least in the demolition of the remains of the old building, the final stone on the dome was laid in 1708. Wren died in 1723 at the age of 91, as work was continuing on the interior of the church.

Saunders also tells us about many of the craftsmen who worked with Wren. Thomas and Edward Strong, father and son, were masons from Burford in the Cotwolds. Thomas laid the first stone, and Edward the last. Andrew Niblett was the coppersmith who made the ball and cross for the top of the dome. The Master Bricklayer, Richard Billinghurst, and his men made the cone of brick around which the dome was built.

The following centuries saw much interior decoration completed, which has turned St Paul’s, in addition to its role as a place of worship, into a gallery of fine art works. James Thornhill won the right, against both Venetian and French competition, to paint the interior of the dome with scenes from the life of St Paul and a false coffering to give an illusion of enormous depth.

The first memorial was to the prison reformer, John Howard, with sculpture by the elder John Bacon. Many sculptural memorials then followed: to Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, Admiral Collingwood, Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Frederic Leighton and, in the 20th century, Lord Kitchener, illustrating the development of British sculpture from John Bacon through to Henry Moore. My only regrets are that two of the finest works of sculpture contained within St Paul’s, The Triumph of Truth over Falsehood, by Alfred Stevens, attached to the Wellington Memorial, and the Pièta, by William Reid Dick, in the Kitchener Chapel, are not among the illustrations.

This is a beautiful, thorough, informative and approachable book. It is one that can be relished by any reader with an interest in London and one of its greatest churches. While it is written by one of the foremost authorities on the history of the City of London and of St Paul’s, it is not over scholarly in its presentation. There is only a short bibliography of the key sources, and no footnotes spelling out further detail in addition to the main text to irritate the general reader. It is delightfully illustrated with many photographs of the interior of the cathedral, of events associated with it, of the many art works contained within and around it. In addition there are interesting diagrams, many quite ancient, which show something of the history and the process of design of the building. It is also very new, with photographs of the recent Diamond Jubilee celebrations in which St Paul’s played a central role.

St Paul’s Cathedral: 1400 Years at the Heart of London  by Ann Saunders  with a Foreword by HRH Prince Charles is published by Scala Publishers, 2012. 144pp., 116 colour illus. Hardback ISBN: 978-1-85759-802-5 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-85758-807-0