Balanica Darius 8 th Grade

St Paul`s Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral, London, is a Church of England cathedral and seat of the Bishop of London. Its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604.St Paul's sits at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, and is the mother church of the Diocese of London. The present church dating from the late 17th century was built to an English Baroque design of Sir Christopher Wren, as part of a major rebuilding program which took place in the city after the Great Fire of London, and was completed within his lifetime. The cathedral is one of the most famous and most recognisable sights of London, with its dome, framed by the spires of Wren's City churches, dominating the skyline for 300 years. At 365 feet (111 m) high, it was the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1962, and its dome is also among the highest in the world. In terms of area, St Paul's is the second largest church building in the United Kingdom after Liverpool Cathedral. St Paul's Cathedral occupies a significant place in the national identity of the English population. It is the central subject of much promotional material, as well as postcard images of the dome standing tall, surrounded by the smoke and fire of the Blitz. Important services held at St Paul's include the funerals of Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Winston Churchill; Jubilee celebrations for Queen Victoria; peace services marking the end of the First and Second World Wars; the marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, the launch of the Festival of Britain and the thanksgiving services for both the Golden Jubilee and 80th Birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. St Paul's Cathedral is a busy working church, with hourly prayer and daily services. Previous cathedrals There had been a late-Roman episcopal see in London. According to the tradition recorded byBede, the first Saxon cathedral was built by Mellitus in AD 604 in Lundenwic. The unproven conjecture that it occupied the site of the present cathedral

is supported by the fact that it was these missionaries' habit, as in mainland Europe, to build cathedrals within Roman cities. However, the Roman city of London, then called Lundenburh, was unoccupied at that time, unlike conditions in the areas of continental Europe where there was continuity of urban occupation and ecclesiastic succession. Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed that the cathedral had been built on the site of a temple dedicated to the goddess Diana, in alignment with the Apollo temple that he imagined once stood at Westminster, although Christopher Wren found no evidence of this. Geoffrey was disbelieved by contemporaries, and there is no evidence of any occupation at the Westminster site in the Roman period. If any church building existed, perhaps a reutilised existing structure, then it would have only been a modest chapel at first and may well have been destroyed after Mellitus was expelled from the city by Sberht's pagan successors. Wherever its predecessor was sited, the successor building within the reoccupied City (built ca 886) was destroyed in a "most fatal fire" in 962, as mentioned in the AngloSaxon Chronicle. Presumably it was made of timber. The third cathedral was begun in 962, perhaps in stone. In it was buried Ethelred the Unready. It burnt, with the whole city, in a fire in 1087, noted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Old St Paul's

Old St Paul's prior to 1561, with intact spire The fourth St Paul's, known when architectural history arose in the 19th century as Old St Paul's, was begun by the Normans after the 1087 fire. Work took over 200 years and a great deal was lost in a fire in 1136. The roof was once more built of wood, which was ultimately to doom the building. The church was consecrated in 1240, but a change of heart led to the commencement of an enlargement programme in 1256. When this 'New Work' was completed in 1314 the cathedral had been consecrated in 1300 it was the third-longest church in Europe and had one of Europe's tallest spires, at some 489 feet (149 m). Excavations by Francis Penrose in 1878 showed that it was 585 feet (178 m) long and 100 feet (30 m) wide (290 feet or 87 m across the transepts and crossing). By the 16th century the building was decaying. Under Henry VIII and Edward VI, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Chantries Acts led to the destruction of interior ornamentation and thecloisters, charnels, crypts, chapels, shrines, chantries and other

buildings in St Paul's Churchyard. Many of these former religious sites in the churchyard, having been seized by the Crown, were sold as shops and rental properties, especially to printers and booksellers, who were often Puritans. Buildings that were razed often supplied ready-dressed building material for construction projects, such as the Lord Protector's city palace, Somerset House. Crowds were drawn to the northeast corner of the churchyard, St Paul's Cross, where open-air preaching took place. In 1561 the spire was destroyed by lightning and it was not replaced; this event was taken by both Protestants and Roman Catholics as a sign of God's displeasure at the other faction's actions. England's first classical architect, Inigo Jones, added the cathedral's west front in the 1630s, but there was much defacing mistreatment of the building by Parliamentarian forces during the Civil War, when the old documents and charters were dispersed and destroyed (Kelly 2004). "Old St Paul's" was gutted in the Great Fire of London of 1666. While it might have been salvageable, albeit with almost complete reconstruction, a decision was taken to build a new cathedral in a modern style instead. Indeed this had been contemplated even before the fire. Description The cathedral is built of Portland stone in a late Renaissance style that represents Wren's vision of a rationalised English Baroque. Its impressive dome was inspired by St Peter's Basilica in Rome andMansart's Church of the Val-de-Grce which Wren had visited. It rises 365 feet (108 m) to the cross at its summit,[30] dominating both the historic and modern City of London through the Baroque device of axial perspectives or 'viewing corridors' across the cityscape. Wren achieved a pleasing balance between interior and exterior by constructing three domes nested one inside the other: the tall outer dome is non-structural and raised above the mass of the cathedral to suit distanced views; the lower inner dome provides a harmoniously balanced interior; between the two a structural cone supports the apex lantern and the outer dome. Wren was said to have been hauled up to the rafters in a basket during the building of its later stages to inspect progress. The nave has three small chapels in the two adjoining aisles The Chapel of All Souls and The Chapel of St Dunstan in the north aisle and the Chapel of St Michael and St George in the south aisle. The main space of the cathedral is centred under the inner dome, which rises 108.4 metres from the cathedral floor and holds three circular galleries the internal Whispering Gallery, the external Stone Gallery, and the external Golden Gallery. The Whispering Gallery runs around the inside of the dome 99 feet (30.2 m) above the cathedral floor. It is reached by 259 steps from ground level. It gets its name because of the acoustic effects peculiar to domes; a whisper against its wall at any point is audible to

a listener with an ear held to the wall at any other point around the gallery. A low murmur is equally audible. The base of the inner dome is 173 feet (53.4 m) above the floor. Its top is about 65 m above the floor, making this the greatest height of the enclosed space. The cathedral is some 574 feet (175 m) in length (including the portico of the Great West Door), of which 223 feet (68 m) is the nave and 167 feet (51 m) is the choir. The width of the nave is 121 feet (37 m) and across the transepts is 246 feet (75 m).[31] The cathedral is thus slightly shorter but somewhat wider than Old St Paul's. The quire extends to the east of the dome and holds the stalls for the clergy and the choir and the organ. To the north and south of the dome are the transepts, here called the North Choir and the South Choir. Details of the towers at the west end (illustration, left) and their dark voids are boldly scaled, in order to read well from the street below and from a distance, for the towers have always stood out in the urban skyline. They are composed of two complementary elements, a central cylinder rising through the tiers in a series of stacked drums, and paired Corinthian columns at the corners, with buttresses above them, which serve to unify the drum shape with the square block plinth containing the clock. The main entablature breaks forward over the paired columns to express both elements, tying them together in a single horizontal band. The cap, like a bell-shaped miniature dome, supports a gilded finial, a pineapple supported on four scrolling angled brackets, the topmost expression of the consistent theme. Memorials The cathedral has a very substantial crypt, holding over 200 memorials, and serves as both the Order of the British Empire Chapel and the Treasury. The cathedral has very few treasures: many have been lost, and in 1810 a major robbery took almost all of the remaining precious artefacts. Christopher Wren was the first person to be interred, in 1723: on the wall above his tomb in the crypt is written, "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" (Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you).