I had a meeting yesterday in an office which overlooks the north transept of St. Paul’s. I have always thought of St. Paul’s as a cool, rather rational building, the product of Wren’s abstract and mathematical mind (see the biography by Lisa Jardine which is as much about him as a scientist as an architect). But seen up close it is pure Roman baroque, devoted to the glories of post-Fire reconstruction and the grandiosity of late seventeenth-century London’s commercial success:-