St Paul's is the cathedral church of the diocese of London, England, and the seat of the bishop, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres. It is an Anglican cathedral, the Roman Catholic counterpart being Westminster Cathedral. The dean is Dr John Moses, who a couple of years ago appeared in a docu-soap about the cathedral.
Old St Paul's, at one time the world's tallest building, burned down in the Great Fire of London, 1666. Mathematician Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to build a replacement. His first designs (and his favourites) had a floor plan in the form of a Greek cross, with equal arms. These were rejected, and a compromise was arrived at in the form of the Latin cross seen today. The great dome, coated on the outside with lead, rests not on the pillars beneath it, but on the walls. Wren formed this element of his design to prove a point. The dome has three galleries. The lowest, the Whispering Gallery, has the property that sound is conducted exceptionally well across it, so that a person on one side may hear a friend whispering to them from specific points on the other. This gallery overlooks the crossing of the cathedral. The second gallery in the Stone Gallery, on the outside, at the base of the outer dome. It has a high parapet of white stone around it. The views from here are not good, and the wind is usually quite bracing. The highest gallery is the Golden Gallery, which is on top of the dome, running around the lantern. From here, one can see over much of central London, from the Millenium Bridge and the Tate Modern to the Bank of England and Smithfield Market.
The nave contains monuments to many great Britons, though not as many as Westminster Abbey. Holman Hunt's painting 'The Light of the World' hangs in the church when it's not on loan. The crypt contains a gift shop, an excellent cafe, a restaurant and the treasury of the cathedral. Also in the crypt (as i recall) is the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren, with its famous inscription 'Si monumentum requiris circumspice'.
St Paul's stands in St Paul's Churchyard, a square and street where once there was presumably a real churchyard. Next to it is the St Paul's Choir School, and there are several religiously-named streets in the area: Creed Lane, Ave Maria Lane, Paternoster Square. The latter was the subject of a disastrous redevelopment plan in the 1960s, approved by the Church Commissioners, who own the site.
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