‘A taut study … Campbell provides a wealth of detail about Wren’s construction methods … lively and informative’
– The Daily Telegraph
See the author speaking about St Paul's in the Blitz.
Building St Paul’s tells the story of the cathedral that has dominated London’s skyline for three hundred years and of those responsible for its construction from the time of the disastrous Great Fire to final completion in 1708.
The figure of Sir Christopher Wren is well known, but this book also considers those ordinary craftsmen, the contractors and overseers, the quarrymen on the Isle of Portland, the humble stonemasons and carpenters who shaped the materials.
James Campbell is the first historian to plough through the documents in search of these people: he describes life on a seventeenth-century building site, the workers’ day-to-day responsibilities, how some were poorly paid while others became millionaires. He also unravels the struggles for money that at one time threatened to undermine the whole enterprise.
Campbell’s account reaffirms St Paul’s not only as one man’s masterwork, but as an incredible collaborative achievement.
James W. P. Campbell, an architect and architectural historian, is the Fellow in Architecture and History of Art at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His first book, Brick: A World History, with photographs by Will Pryce, was published by Thames & Hudson in 2003.
