St. Paul's, the largest cathedral in England, is Wren's masterpiece. With it, he brought a repertoire of new forms (the dome, for example) and architectural combinations into English architecture. The building is something of an encyclopedia of Wren's impressions of the architecture of the continent... Wren fashioned the façade of St. Paul's with two tiers of paired Corinthian columns like those of the Louvre and framed them between towers inspired by those of Borromini's Roman church of S. Agnese. Above the two-story base rises a tremendous peripteral dome that reinterprets Bramante's Tempietto of 1502. Pietro da Cortona's projecting curved porches of Santa Maria della Pace have become St. Paul's transept porches

St Paul's Cathedral took a decade to design and forty years to build. The architect was Sir Christopher Wren who lived to see the cathedral completed in his lifetime. In the early 1660s Wren had designed a handful of buildings in Oxford and Cambridge. In the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, when still only in his thirties, he was entrusted with the task of rebuilding St Paul's, the greatest building project of the age. Christopher Wren completed his masterpiece in 1711. It was hailed as the world's first Protestant cathedral and to this day dominates much of the City's skyline.

Towering above many of today's young pretenders it is eclipsed by only a few monoliths such as the NatWest Tower. Inside it houses Flaxman's Nelson memorial and Steven's Duke of Wellington monument.

The huge dome houses the "whispering gallery" with its eerie and echoey acoustic effects

The nearest Underground station is St Paul's on the Central Line (within Zone 1) which is a five minute walk from the Cathedral. Mansion House, Cannon Street and Blackfriars stations on the District and Circle Line are a slightly longer walk. Central Line trains run every 4 minutes during weekdays and every 6 minutes at weekends.

Please note that all these stations cannot be accessed by people using wheelchairs. Please contact London Transport for information about the closest station to the Cathedral for wheelchair users.