London: The City — St Paul's to Bank

Listen & look closer

We start outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Give the whole building a moment before looking for a detail. That dome rises to a hundred and eleven metres, which is rather good at making the people around it feel like punctuation marks.

There’s a useful habit for this walk: look at what the building asks your eyes to do. Here, the columns lead upwards, the towers frame the sky, and then the dome takes over. Even from outside, the architecture is organising the view for us.

But we’re not spending the whole walk looking up. Some of the City’s best clues are much smaller than this. A gateway tucked beside the cathedral, a row of memorial tiles, a line in the ground. We’ll keep the cathedral as our starting scale, then come down to street level.