A valentine to St Paul’s Cathedral

I love St Pauls Cathedral. I remember when the first Covid lockdown ended and having no-one else, went to hug one of the great columns on the front of the building in gratitude for making it through the pandemic to that stage.

Like Big Ben and various other church bells, St Pauls seems to be in so many aspects of my life and unlike the others, it still dominates the skyline from in some-places, miles around.

Normally I think it is hard to beat the classic view from in front of the main entrance or in my opinion just as good is the view from down Ludgate Hill.

A few nights ago however I did a special tour at night time. I don’t normally do night tours as I’m an early-bird and London is so big, it just takes a long time to get home and then invariably I am up again at 5am.

For some reason I had 2 large corporate groups booked in at very short notice in the same day; one in the morning and then the other at the end of the afternoon and in a totally different part of the city. They were very easy going what they wanted to see and pretty much were happy to do whatever between their hotel and where they were eating that night.

It gave me the scope to just go with the flow, see some amazing buildings that I normally only enjoy in the daylight and also go down some creepy isolated passageways in the dark.

One of the places I went to almost but not quite by chance was to one of my Secret Gardens of the City of London which is featured in both my #1 rated tour of London and also the book which enjoyed the same ranking!

The garden underwent a bit of a change last year and now features a lovely flat water feature which is designed to reflect the dome of St Pauls. I’d seen it a few times in the day time but wondered what it would look like on a clear and quite frozen winter night.

Doesn’t it look amazing? Such a beautiful building and a wonderful idea to create such a water feature. My tourists who were return corporate tourists all the way from the USA absolutely loved it and we all took our fill of photos.

As you can see as is usually the way with my tours, we had the place all to ourselves. St Pauls will always be my valentine