The City's Layers: A Walk Through the Square Mile

St Paul's Cathedral

Wren's masterpiece, the dome that defined London's skyline for 250 years. Stood firm through the Blitz.

You're standing on Ludgate Hill, the highest natural point in the City of London. The great dome above you has dominated this skyline since 1710. Christopher Wren built it over 35 years, on the ashes of the medieval cathedral the Great Fire gutted in 1666. Look up: that dome is actually three shells.

An outer lead-covered dome you can see from across London, a hidden brick cone that carries the weight, and an inner dome painted with scenes from the life of Saint Paul. During the Blitz, a bomb pierced the outer shell and lodged in the brickwork. Sappers defused it before it could destroy the whole building. That photograph of the dome rising intact above the smoke became the image of London's defiance.

Wren is buried in the crypt beneath you, under a plain stone that reads, in Latin, 'If you seek his monument, look around you.'

Guildhall

Medieval hall built atop a Roman amphitheatre. Seat of City government for 600 years.

You're standing in Guildhall Yard. That dark ellipse of stone set into the paving traces the wall of a Roman amphitheatre buried beneath your feet. It held six thousand spectators, and gladiators walked through an entrance that still exists, preserved in the basement of the art gallery to your left. The building that faces you, the Guildhall itself, has been the seat of City government since the 1400s.

Its Great Hall has seen state trials. Lady Jane Grey was condemned to death here at sixteen. The Lord Mayor's Banquet has been held every year since 1502. The roof above that hall burned twice: once in the Great Fire of 1666, when Samuel Pepys watched it blaze 'like a palace of gold,' and again on the night of 29 December 1940, the Second Great Fire of London.

The current roof, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, the man who gave London its red telephone boxes, went up in 1953.

Bank Junction

Nine streets converge at the historic heart of the City. The Bank of England, Royal Exchange, and Mansion House face each other here.

You're standing at Bank junction, where nine streets converge like spokes of a wheel. Threadneedle Street, home of the Bank of England, runs northeast. Cornhill and Lombard Street carry the old Roman road east toward Leadenhall. Prince's Street, the one you just walked down, leads back toward the Guildhall.

This junction was once a simple fork where the east-west road through the City split three ways. The Victorians carved Queen Victoria Street through the medieval tangle in the 1870s, and King William Street followed, giving the junction its modern shape. Directly beneath you, in one of the tube station's ticket halls, you'd pass through what was once the crypt of the church of St Mary Woolnoth. The station swallowed it whole.