The London Walker

The wonderful St Paul’s Cathedral sat at the top of Ludgate Hill, captured in a moment of sunny spring like reflection last week. After days of endless grey, the sun came out and everyone rushed on to the streets shedding jackets and scarfs optimistically. Now the biting wind and rain has returned. We’re not through March yet and it’s letting us know it. 

St Paul’s has been here a long time, longer than most people assume, in fact it’s had around five incarnations before the present one with which we are all so lovingly familiar. The first was built in 604 AD by Mellitus the Saxon bishop of London on the site of a Roman temple; then in accordance with behaviour patterns of the time, the Vikings managed to burn it and its successor to the ground. 

There’s a long history of fire associated with St Paul’s. The current version is the magnificent work of Sir Christopher Wren, our Leonardo Da Vinci of architecture, who designed this unbelievably grand building after the Great Fire of 1666.

On the pediment above the southern entrance, looking down to the Thames, rears an astonishing Phoenix, who like the cathedral itself is rising from the ashes, reborn again. Beneath it are the words ‘Resurgam’; I shall rise again. It is the only words found on the exterior of the building.

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