St Paul's Cathedral

Where it sits. St Paul's stands on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, on a site that has carried a cathedral since 604. The present building is the fifth. Its dome, 111 metres to the top of the cross, made it the tallest building in London from 1710 until 1963, and sightlines protected by law still keep new towers out of the view from Richmond Park, Greenwich and Primrose Hill. The Millennium Bridge runs from the south side of the churchyard straight across the Thames to Tate Modern; Blackfriars is seven minutes west, Bank and the Royal Exchange eight minutes east.

Wren's cathedral. Old St Paul's, a vast medieval church that had already lost its spire to lightning in 1561, burnt in the Great Fire of September 1666. Christopher Wren spent years fighting the chapter over the replacement, at one point winning approval for a design he then substantially abandoned under a clause permitting ornamental variations. Building ran from 1675 to 1710, in Portland stone, and Wren lived to see it finished. The dome is the trick of the building: an inner masonry dome sized for the interior, a hidden brick cone carrying the 850-tonne stone lantern, and an outer timber-and-lead shell shaped for the skyline, with a chain of iron set into the base to resist the outward thrust. The result looks like one dome from the street and reads as a different, lower one from inside.

Climbing and looking. Three galleries are open to visitors. The Whispering Gallery, 259 steps up, runs around the inside of the dome at about 30 metres and carries a whisper right around its circumference along the curved wall. The Stone Gallery at 376 steps is the first outdoor level. The Golden Gallery, 528 steps up and just under 85 metres, is a narrow ring at the base of the lantern with a view down the Thames past the Shard and across to the towers of the City. The stairs narrow sharply above the Stone Gallery and there is no lift for the upper levels. In the crypt lie Nelson, in a sarcophagus originally made for Cardinal Wolsey, Wellington, whose funeral car sat here for decades, and Wren himself, under the epitaph that tells the reader looking for his monument to look around.

On screen. St Paul's supplies the closing stretch of the London chase in Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018). The cathedral was one of the locations still unsecured when Tom Cruise broke his ankle on the rooftops nearby in August 2017, and Christopher McQuarrie used the enforced shutdown to negotiate access and rebuild the sequence around it, so the dome ends up as the visual anchor of the whole pursuit. The building's other great screen credit is the Geometric Staircase in the South West Bell Tower, a cantilevered spiral of stone treads with a wrought iron balustrade, which stood in for the Divination stairway in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and has been used repeatedly since. The cathedral is otherwise better known for one photograph than for any film: Herbert Mason's shot of the dome standing above the smoke of the Blitz on the night of 29 December 1940, taken from the roof of the Daily Mail building while volunteers of the St Paul's Watch put out incendiaries on the leadwork.

Occasions. The cathedral is a working church, and its calendar has carried much of modern British public life: the funerals of Nelson, Wellington and Winston Churchill, thanksgiving services for the end of both world wars, the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981, and the Jubilee services of Elizabeth II. Choral evensong is sung most weekday afternoons and is free to attend, which remains the cheapest and often the most memorable way to experience the interior.

Practical notes. Entry is ticketed for sightseeing, cheaper booked online, and includes an audio guide and the crypt; worshippers attend services at no charge. Photography inside was long forbidden and is now permitted in most areas without flash. The building closes to sightseers on Sundays. Allow two hours for the interior, crypt and dome climb together.

Getting there and timing. St Paul's station on the Central line is 200 metres away; Mansion House, Blackfriars and Bank are all within ten minutes. Weekday mornings before eleven are the quietest, and the Golden Gallery is best in clear weather, ideally in the hour after opening before the City haze thickens. The churchyard on the north side, with its benches and plane trees, is the standard lunch spot for office workers and a good place to sit and look up at the west towers.