Salisbury Cathedral

Britain's tallest spire stands on foundations four feet deep, in a water meadow, and it has been falling over — very slowly, and under close supervision — for seven hundred years. It also sits above a Chapter House holding the best-preserved of the four surviving originals of Magna Carta, in a building put up in a single campaign of thirty-eight years, which makes it the most stylistically consistent great church in England. This guide walks all of it, and is straight about which of its famous claims survive checking.

A cathedral built once, in one style, on the wrong ground

The move from Old Sarum

The first cathedral was two miles north, inside the royal castle at Old Sarum: a hilltop Norman fortress that was windswept, short of water, and shared awkwardly with a garrison the clergy did not get on with. In 1220 the bishop moved the whole institution down into the meadows and started again from nothing.

The consequence is what makes Salisbury unusual. Almost every English cathedral is a conversation between centuries — Norman piers under Perpendicular windows, a Decorated chapter house bolted onto an Early English choir. Salisbury was built between 1220 and 1258, in one go, in one style: Early English Gothic, lancet windows throughout, no tracery, no later fashions in the main fabric. It is the closest thing England has to a single-author cathedral.

The spire, and the lean

Then, around 1300–1330, they added the tower and spire, and everything since has been a consequence of that decision. The spire reaches 404 feet, the tallest church spire in Britain, and weighs something like 6,500 tons. It stands on four crossing piers that were built for a modest lantern tower, on foundations about four feet deep in a water meadow.

The piers bowed. Go and stand at the crossing and look up the shafts — you can see them curving inward. The spire is about 27 inches, some 70 centimetres, out of true. Strainer arches were thrown across the eastern crossing to spread the load; Christopher Wren surveyed the building in 1668, confirmed the displacement, and designed the tie-beams and bracing above the crossing; iron ties have been added in every century since. The top nine metres were rebuilt in 1950 and a major spire restoration ran from 1986 to 1996.

One story to treat carefully: you will be told there is a brass plate in the crossing floor from which the lean is measured by dropping a plumb line from inside the spire. It is repeated everywhere and it may well be true, but it is not on the cathedral's own pages and this guide could not verify it. Ask a steward — they will know, and they enjoy being asked.

James Wyatt, and what is missing

The other thing shaping what you see is destruction. In 1789–92 the architect James Wyatt was let loose on the building in the name of improvement. He demolished the medieval detached bell tower that stood in the Close — which is why Salisbury, unlike Chichester or Evesham, has no campanile. He pulled down two chapels, removed the medieval rood screen, cleared the nave of its furnishings, destroyed medieval glass, and dug up the tombs and rearranged them into the tidy rows you now see marching down the nave arcades.

It is worth knowing while you walk the nave that the pleasing uncluttered emptiness everybody admires is not medieval. It is late-Georgian taste, imposed with a shovel.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Close

You come in through a gate, because the Close is still a walled precinct that is still locked at night, and at over 80 acres it is the largest cathedral close in Britain. The gates are the High Street Gate, St Ann's Gate and Harnham Gate.

What is inside is a small museum quarter that most cathedral visitors ignore: Mompesson House (National Trust, and the Sense and Sensibility house), the Salisbury Museum, the Rifles Museum, Sarum College, and Arundells, which was Edward Heath's house and is open to visitors. Give the Close half an hour of its own; the approach across the lawn is the view Constable painted.

The nave and the font

Inside, the nave runs away in identical bays of Purbeck marble shafts and plain lancets. In the middle of it sits the newest thing in the building and the best: William Pye's font, installed in 2008. It is a cruciform bronze basin filled to the absolute brim, so the surface is a perfect black mirror reflecting the vault, with water running constantly and silently out of four corner spouts into gratings in the floor.

It is used for baptisms, and it is also the single most photographed object in the building, because on a still day it doubles the whole cathedral upside down.

The clock

In the north nave aisle stands an iron frame of wheels and weights with no face and no hands, because it was made to strike the hours rather than show them. The cathedral dates it to 1386 and calls it the oldest working mechanical clock in the world; it was found in a tower in 1928, restored, and now runs on free demonstration.

The claim is contested, and honestly so. The 1386 date comes from a deed referring to a clock in a bell tower that no longer exists, plus a judgement about the mechanism made after its rediscovery; some horologists think the construction looks sixteenth- or seventeenth-century, and at a 1993 symposium roughly a third of those present voted for a much later date. Wells has a rival claim, and the Rye clock has been argued for too. It is a genuinely extraordinary machine either way.

William Longespée

In the nave lies the first person buried in this building: William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury, illegitimate son of Henry II, half-brother to King John, one of the witnesses to Magna Carta, and dead in 1226 — six years after the foundation stone and thirty-two before the building was finished. His effigy is one of the earliest military effigies in England, and there is a direct line from him in the nave to the document in the Chapter House.

The Prisoners of Conscience window

At the far east end, the Trinity Chapel — the earliest part of the building, finished first so services could start — is filled with a wall of deep blue. Gabriel Loire of Chartres made the Prisoners of Conscience window in dalle de verre, thick slab glass set in concrete, and it was installed around 1980 as a memorial to those imprisoned for their beliefs. Sit in the chapel for five minutes: from the nave it reads as an abstract blue blaze, and only up close do the figures resolve.

The cloisters and the library

The cloisters were begun about 1240 and the cathedral calls them the largest in Britain. There is a good oddity here: Salisbury never had a monastery. It was a secular cathedral run by canons who lived in their own houses in the Close, so the cloister had no functional purpose at all — it was built because a great church of the period was expected to have one. Over the east walk is the library of 1445, which holds one of the best cathedral manuscript collections in the country.

The Chapter House, and the frieze nobody looks at

Off the cloister is the octagonal Chapter House of about 1263, its vault springing from a single slender central pillar, redecorated by William Burges in 1855–59.

Running round the walls at head height, above the stalls, is a carved stone frieze of some sixty scenes telling Genesis and Exodus — Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, Joseph, Moses. It is thirteenth-century, it is at eye level, and virtually every visitor in the room walks straight past it to the glass case at the far end. Do the frieze first and Magna Carta second, and you will be almost alone.

Magna Carta

And then the case. Four originals of the 1215 Magna Carta survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle, and this one. Salisbury's is generally reckoned the best preserved of the four — the clearest text, the least damage.

How it got here is the good part. Elias of Dereham was present at Runnymede when John agreed the charter, and was one of the men entrusted with distributing copies to the counties. He brought one to the old cathedral at Old Sarum. He then became a canon of Salisbury and was the man overseeing the construction of the new cathedral from 1220. The document and the building came down the hill together, in the hands of the same person.

It is displayed in a purpose-built enclosure with humidity control, UV-filtering glass and data loggers monitoring light and temperature, at the end of a short exhibition. It is kept deliberately dim. Give your eyes a minute.

The Tower Tour

332 steps take you to 68 metres — the base of the spire, not the top — through the roof spaces and out onto the parapet. You walk above the nave vault, see the medieval timber scaffolding still inside the spire, the treadwheel used to haul stone, and the ironwork holding the whole thing together, and you come out with a view over the Close, the water meadows and the Wiltshire downs.

It is £25 on top of admission, runs several times daily in small timed groups, has a minimum age of 7 and a minimum height of 1.2 metres, and takes 90 to 105 minutes. Book online before you travel and arrive fifteen minutes early for the safety briefing, which is compulsory.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Chapter House frieze Sixty carved scenes of Genesis and Exodus at head height, in the room everyone crosses without looking up.
• Magna Carta One of four 1215 originals and the best preserved, brought here by the man who then built the cathedral around it.
• Pye's font 2008, filled to the brim, and it reflects the whole vault upside down on a still day.
• The bowed crossing piers Stand under the tower and look up the shafts. You can see the stone curving under 6,500 tons.
• The Prisoners of Conscience window Trinity Chapel, Gabriel Loire, a wall of blue slab glass that only resolves into figures close up.
• William Longespée Magna Carta witness, half-brother of King John, and the first person buried in the building.
• The clock Faceless, weight-driven, demonstrated free — and the subject of a genuine and unresolved dating argument.
• The Close 80 acres, three medieval gates, four museums and Edward Heath's house, and most cathedral visitors never leave the lawn.

Insider tips

Go to Evensong. It is free, it needs no ticket, it is sung at 5.30pm most days in term, and the choir has included girls since 1991 — Salisbury was the first cathedral in England to have girl choristers.

Walk out to the water meadows. The path across the meadows to Harnham gives you the view from Constable's painting, and on a still evening it is the best twenty minutes in Wiltshire.

Do not try to bolt Stonehenge onto the same half-day. It is nine miles away, it needs a timed ticket of its own, and the shuttle system means it takes far longer than the distance suggests. One in the morning and one in the afternoon works; both in three hours does not.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Salisbury is small and prosperous, and everything is within ten minutes' walk of the Close. Stay inside the medieval centre rather than out by the ring road; the market place, the Poultry Cross and the streets north of the cathedral have the eating and the pubs. The Close itself has no hotels, which is what keeps it as quiet as it is.

More English cathedrals

• Winchester Cathedral — the longest medieval cathedral in the world, half an hour east.
• Wells Cathedral — the scissor arches, and the rival claim to the oldest working clock.
• Canterbury Cathedral — the murder of Becket and the greatest shrine in northern Europe.

See all the English cathedrals in this guide →