The St Paul’s Cathedral standing today is the fifth church on its London site, which began with King Ethelbert’s church in AD 604. The Norman Old St Paul’s, begun after a fire in 1087, had a spire nearly 489 feet high. During the Reformation, Lord Mayor Sir Rowland Hill was ordered in 1550 to destroy the high altar, but evidence suggests he moved it and the relics of St Erkenwald to Soulton Hall in Shropshire, where surveys show double cube anomalies underground. The Great Fire of September 1666 destroyed the old cathedral, and Christopher Wren’s walk-in Great Model of 1673 was rejected as un-English before his Warrant design won approval with room for ornamental changes.

Over 35 years those changes became an English Baroque dome resting on eight piers above a crypt that spreads the load across London clay. The dome has three layers: a plaster inner dome, a lead-covered timber outer dome, and a hidden 18 inch brick cone bound with wrought iron chains that carries an 850 ton stone lantern. Suffragettes planted a bomb in 1913, and in the December 1940 Blitz Churchill ordered firefighters to save the building, captured in Herbert Mason’s photograph. In 2011 the Occupy London camp closed the cathedral and led to the resignations of Giles Fraser and Graeme Knowles.

• Why a tall exterior dome would feel like a chimney from inside without an inner shell
• The barrel hoop analogy for how the chains contain the cone’s lateral thrust
• The mustard tin bomb now held by the City of London Police Museum
• Lieutenant Robert Davies defusing a delayed-action bomb that left a 100 foot crater at Hackney Marshes
• The 2023 East India Company Trail and Gerry Judah’s First World War centenary sculptures