St. Paul's Cathedral

St. Paul's Cathedral is on the must-see list of everyone I have talked to about London, so it was great to see the visitor points of the Cathedral but even more great to get the behind the scenes "attic room" tour.

Our guide, Yvonne, was an informative and lively woman who has been with the St. Paul's for 12 years. She shared with our group the history of the Cathedral, saying that what we see today is actually the 5th iteration of the religious space, having most recently been replaced after the 4th cathedral burned down in the Great Fire of 1666. It took Christopher Wren about 40 years to complete this project, finishing in 1710. 

A facsimile of the cathedral made by Christopher Wren

After bringing us up to the triforium, or what she dubbed "the attic", Yvonne showed to us some of the treasures the Cathedral has no space for in their main areas. Included here were daring paintings, Viking tombstones, and stones from former cathedrals (ie. a pile of rocks). Here too was the library, though I can only assume not because they don't know what else to do with it. 

Jo Wisdom is the resident librarian at St. John's Cathedral. He brought us into a small, stuffed library full of books and packing material. They were in the middle of preparing for a major conservation project which meant removing all of the items to an offsite location- a task which is much loftier than I would have expected and required consultation with senior professionals. As with all libraries, they have a limited budget and had to decide on their priorities towards the library space and the library collection. They determined that it's more important to clean the room than to restore certain items and put them back into a dirty and potentially harmful room.

Though a diminutive man with a quiet voice, Jo was captivating for a group of library students. He told us different points of their library history, such as how they had very few items remaining after the Great Fire and had to beg, borrow, steal, and buy new materials to fill their collection. He explained how a predecessor weeded their collection, disregarding the important post-published life of a book that can tell so much about how certain materials were used and about the people who used them. Jo told us how the materials were removed during the Second World War and stored in a Welsh cave to save them from bomb raids. Today, many of their materials are housed in two different archives across the city.

The collection is what you might expect from a large cathedral- ecclesiastical material, theology, and church history. They have complete records of the positions of clergy from around the world, a "who's who" which I would never have considered. Their website states that "current acquisitions are restricted to major works on the history of the Church in England, on Wren and the building of the Cathedral, the Church in the City, and 'alumni' material."

After our official tour, we were given a chance to look around the Cathedral. I sat quietly in the Whispering Gallery lest people across the room overhear through the holes in the walls, and took in views of London at the Stone Gallery and Golden Gallery. It was just a lovely day.