St. Paul's from the top of the Dome to the Crypt.

On my last walk round the City I meant to walk to St. Paul's from the Monument, but I never got there. Too many distractions.   So next day to be sure I caught the 381 bus which goes behind the Tate, got off at Tate Modern and walked across the Millennium Bridge, nicknamed the Wobbly Bridge because due to an unfortunate design fault it swayed slightly when hoards of pedestrians stamped across when it was first opened.  So it had to be shut and I remember bales of straw hanging from it as they tried to work out the best way to stabilise it.  Now the bridge, by Arup, Foster and Caro, is open again.  Over the bridge is the Salvation Army restaurant, very good for a cup of coffee and a bun.  Straight ahead is St. Paul's.  The foundations of the chapter house of the old cathedral are picked out in stone in front of Sir Christopher Wren's building, otherwise the new cathedral more or less sits on the footprint of the cathedral destroyed by the 1666 Great Fire of London.

From the Golden Gallery round the Dome

Last time I went into St. Paul's Cathedral I was sixteen.  I was enjoying a week in London with my fourteen year old best friend and her twelve year old sister.  My own ten year old sister was considered too young.  Now that I am over seventy I am amazed at our parents letting any of us run around London on our own.  I can't remember where we were staying,  maybe a youth hostel.  We went all round the Circle Line tube just to see if it really went a complete circle, and emerged smelling of coal dust.  We were taken to tea in the House of Lords by kind and generous Lord W., connection of my friends, and smuggled from the way-up high benches of the cheap upper galleries of the Royal Opera House through a secret passage way into the fashionable crush bar to meet the beautiful, glamorous Lady W.  We went to Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly and ate as much as we could, and more.  We went to St. Paul's Cathedral and tested the acoustics of the Whispering Gallery, up 257 steps, under the dome but that is as far as we went.  Either the outside galleries were not open to tourists then or we didn't know about them as I am sure if we had known we would have climbed the 119 steps to the Stone Gallery and then the 175 steps to the Golden Gallery to look out over London. These steps are between the outer dome, which is really a decorative shell and the structural cone which supports the dome and the lantern..  Towards the top the stairway is extremely steep and narrow, and then you are out, in the wind, behind the balustrade.

Samuel Wale & John Gwynn engraving, 1755 (Wikipedia)

Looking out over London I saw what I had come for, the modern re-development since H. V. Morton stood there  in 1951 and looked out over the devastated, bombed City of London, scarcely a church untouched, the area directly around the Cathedral completely destroyed, the cellars open to the sky. There were two direct hits, one bomb went straight through the roof and destroyed the high altar, the other exploded in the north transept.  A third was removed from its 27' deep hole by the extremely brave Royal Engineers and detonated in Hackney Marshes where it made a 100'crater, quite enough to destroy the cathedral.

St. Paul's in the Blitz:
Photo: Herbert Mason, 20 Dec. 1940, from the Daily Mail Building (Wikipedia)

Would Morton approve of St. Mary Axe, popularly called the Gherkin, by Norman Foster and the Arup Group?  The Baltic Exchange which this building replaced would have been one of the few buildings Morton could still see from St. Paul's in 1951; it was lost to IRA bombing in 1992 but a stained glass window is still preserved in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.  The Gherkin is one of my favourite London buildings and  I deplore 122 Leadenhall Street the new 'Cheesegrater' building by Richard Rodgers now partially obscuring it.  Rivalry between the ex-business partners?  Would Morton enjoy my other favourite London building, the Shard, by Renzo Piano, another past partner of Rodgers? And what of the top-heavy  'Walkie Talkie Building, 20 Fenchurch Street by Rafael Vinoly?  I think he would probably not approve of the new fashion for skyscrapers but he might be pleased to see so many of the Wren churches faithfully restored, and he might be both pleased and amazed to see the City sprung to life again..

20 Fenchurch St. from the Golden Gallery round the Dome

I went down to the Crypt with all its memorials to past wars but also to artists and poets; both Wellington and Nelson, the great leaders in the Napoleonic Wars, were buried here after their enormous funeral processions through the streets of London. Wellington also has the largest monument in the Cathedral, showing him riding his horse Copenhagen.  There were strong objections to having a horse in the cathedral and he was only installed in 1912. Nelson lies in a sarcophagus paid for by Henry VIII's chief minister Cardinal Wolsey, left unused after Wolsey's  sudden fall from favour due to that unfortunate matter of the King's divorce.  Lawrence of Arabia, leader of the Arabs in a more recent war is remembered here too, with Florence Nightingale, one of the few women, from the Crimea, another war in the Middle East. But so are poets and painters; the Dean of St. Pauls' and poet, John Donne, the only memorial to have survived the 1666 Great Fire, the painter J. M. W. Turner, the diarist Samuel Johnson, the poet and painter William Blake, the musician Sir Arthur Sullivan, but not his, un-knighted, collaborator, the satirist W.S. Gilbert. Of course,  Sir Christopher Wren is buried here.  His inscription ends: ' if you seek his monument look around you' .  Building began in 1669 when Wren was 37, the cathedral was topped out in 1708. When building the dome, Wren, in his 70s, was hauled up in a basket to inspect the work.  He was older than I am now.

From the Golden Gallery, round the Dome

I meant to continue with the story of my walk around St. Paul's but  I will have to leave that to another time.
Refs:  Wikipedia;
H.V. Morton, In Search of London, 1951