Salisbury Cathedral

Salisbury became the seat of a bishop in 1075, when the city stood at Old Sarum, on a hill two miles north of the present cathedral; the cathedral built there was consecrated in 1092. In 1197 Bishop Herbert Poore sought permission to re-site it, possibly because of deteriorating relations between the clergy and the military at Old Sarum. Permission was granted, but the move waited until the tenure of his brother and successor, Richard Poore. A legend tells that Poore shot an arrow in the direction he meant to build, and that it struck a deer which died where the cathedral stands. The foundation stones were laid on 28 April 1220 by William Longespée, 3rd Earl of Salisbury, and Ela of Salisbury, 3rd Countess.

Construction was paid for by donations, principally from the canons and vicars of south-east England, asked to give a fixed annual sum until the building was finished. Much of the freestone came from the Teffont Evias quarry, and the high water table on the new site meant foundations only four feet deep. By 1258 the nave, transepts and choir were complete. Built mostly within 38 years, Salisbury has by far the most consistent architectural style of any medieval English cathedral: Early English or Lancet Gothic, named for its untraceried windows.

The only major sections begun later were the cloisters, added in 1240, and the chapter house in 1263, followed by the tower and spire, which at 404 feet dominated the skyline from 1330. On completion the spire was the highest masonry spire in England and the third highest overall, after Lincoln and Old St Paul's.

Tower and spire together added 6,397 long tons to the building's weight, and the great pillars at the crossing can be seen bending inwards under the stress. Buttresses, bracing arches and anchor irons were added over the centuries; when the spire of Old St Paul's fell after a fire in 1561, Salisbury's became the tallest church spire in the country. Christopher Wren designed reinforcing tie-beams above the crossing in 1668, which halted further deformation.

The architect James Wyatt made substantial changes from 1790, replacing the rood screen and demolishing a bell tower that stood about 320 feet north-west of the cathedral. The clock that had hung in that tower, dating from about 1386 and made without a face, was moved into the cathedral tower and ran there until 1884. It was then put into storage and forgotten, rediscovered in a cathedral attic in 1928, and restored to working order in 1956.

The chapter house holds the best-preserved of the four surviving original copies of Magna Carta. It came to Salisbury through Elias of Dereham, who was at Runnymede in 1215 and given the task of distributing some of the originals; he later became a canon of Salisbury and supervised the cathedral's construction. William Burges redecorated the octagonal chapter house between 1855 and 1859, its frieze carrying scenes from Genesis and Exodus. In 2018 the outer layer of its double-glazed case was broken in an attempted theft; the document was undamaged, and in January 2020 Mark Royden was convicted of the attempt and of £14,466 of criminal damage.

The cathedral close is Britain's largest, described by Pevsner as "the most beautiful of England's closes", and is crowded with listed buildings: the King's House, now Salisbury Museum; Mompesson House, owned by the National Trust; and Arundells, the former home of Edward Heath.

Cathedral constables were first appointed when the cathedral became a liberty in 1611, keeping order in the close; the liberty's right to a separate police force was conclusively ended by the Local Government Act 1888. The cathedral's five "Close Constables" were made redundant in 2010 as a cost-cutting measure.

The cathedral is the mother church of the Diocese of Salisbury and the seat of its bishop, Stephen Lake, installed in 2022; Nicholas Papadopulos has been dean since 2018. It has been listed Grade I since February 1952. In 2008 the 750th anniversary of the consecration was marked, and that September a font by the water sculptor William Pye was installed in the nave, its £180,000 cost met entirely by donations. From 16 January 2021, closed to services during the COVID-19 pandemic, the building housed part of the UK vaccination programme, with organ music played as people were vaccinated. In February 2024 removal of the last scaffolding from an external restoration begun in 1985 left the full exterior visible for the first time in 38 years.