Saint Paul's Cathedral United Kingdom

Legendary

This enormous white cathedral is one of the tallest buildings in London.

Kid Rating:

Sir Christopher Wren is buried in the crypt of the cathedral he designed. His tombstone doesn't have a statue or a carving of his face.

Instead, a Latin inscription written by his son reads, "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."

A church has stood on this hill in London for more than 1,400 years. The last one before Wren's, known as Old St Paul's, was a huge medieval cathedral with a spire that had been struck by lightning and never rebuilt.

By the 1660s, it was falling apart. Wren, then a young astronomer and mathematician just starting out as an architect, was hired to plan repairs.

Then, in September 1666, the Great Fire of London swept through the city. It burned for four days, destroyed 88 churches, and gutted Old St Paul's.

The king decided to start over. Wren, who was 33 at the time, spent nine years on the design, and construction finally began in 1675.

His big idea was the dome. English churches had spires, not domes, and Wren wanted something like St Peter's in Rome.

He got help from his friend Isaac Newton, who had just worked out the laws of gravity, to make sure it would stand. What looks like one dome is really three shells nested inside each other, with a brick cone hidden in the middle holding up the lantern on top.

The dome rises 365 feet, one foot for every day of the year. It was the tallest building in London for more than 250 years.

The cathedral was finished in 1710, after 35 years of work. Wren lived to see it done and died in 1723, the first person buried in the crypt.

On the night of December 29, 1940, German bombs set fire to the streets around the cathedral. A photographer captured the dome rising above the smoke, and the picture became a symbol of London refusing to give up.

Climb the 257 steps to the Whispering Gallery inside the dome, where a whisper against the wall can be heard on the other side. Keep going to the Golden Gallery at the top, 528 steps up, for a view over the whole city. Then head down to the crypt to find Wren's tomb and read his epitaph for yourself.