There it is. Saint Paul's. That dome is one of the most recognisable objects in the world, and everything about it is a rescue job after a disaster.
Because there was a Saint Paul's here before this one, and it was, frankly, a mess. Old Saint Paul's was medieval, enormous, and by the sixteen hundreds it had gone to seed. Its spire had been struck by lightning and burned off back in fifteen sixty-one and never rebuilt. And the inside had turned into a shopping centre. The great nave, the holy heart of the cathedral, had become a public thoroughfare called Paul's Walk — a place where Londoners did their shopping, spread their gossip, hired servants, and cut business deals, right there in the church. One writer of the time called it "the general mint of all famous lies," meaning it was where every rumour in London got minted. People literally fired arrows at the pigeons through the windows. It was less a house of God than a very echoey mall.
Then the Great Fire took it. And it took it s
pectacularly — the enormous lead roof, six acres of it, melted in the heat and ran down the surrounding streets in rivers. Worse, the city's booksellers had panicked as the flames came and stashed their entire stock, thousands of books, in the stone crypt underneath for safety. The crypt turned into an oven. Their books burned for a week.
So the job of building a new cathedral went to Christopher
