Definately our most popular read of this year. The book is really very interesting with an "I never knew that" factor throughout. A must read for any fan of Wren's masterpiece.

BUILDING ST PAUL'S
James W. P. Campbell

St. Paul's Cathedral has dominated London's skyline for three hundred years. Building St. Paul's tells the story of this remarkable landmark and those responsible for it's construction, from the time of the disastrous Great Fire to the Cathedral's final completion 1708. The figure of Sir Christopher Wren is well known: the son of a Wiltshire clergyman who became the greatest architect in English history. Yet this book also considers those craftsmen whose work on St. Paul's has received less attention: 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 examine the documents systematically in search of these humble men (and very few women): in a brilliantly original account, he describes life on a seventeenth-century building site, the workers' day-to-day responsibilities, how some were poorly paid while others became millionaires on the side.  He also unravels the complicated tangle of the cathedral's finances and the struggles for money that at one time threatened to undermine the whole enterprise.

By re-creating in intimate detail this epic seventeenth-century undertaking in Restoration London, Campbell's account reaffirms St Paul's not only as one man's masterwork, but as an incredible collaborative achievement.

With 52 illustrations, 11 in colour