St Paul's Cathedral - London, UK - Satellite Imagery Oddities on Waymarking.com

The St Paul's Cathedral website tells us:

St Paul's is London's Cathedral and embodies the spiritual life and heritage of the British people. Cathedrals serve a wide community. A Cathedral houses the seat - or in Latin, cathedra - of the bishop, making it a centre for Christian worship and teaching, and the Christian mission.

St Paul's Cathedral acts as an important meeting place for people and ideas, as a centre for the arts, learning and public debate.

St Paul’s is the Cathedral of the Diocese of London. The Diocese is made up of five episcopal areas: Willesden, Edmonton, Stepney, London and Kensington. Four of these have an Area Bishop, to whom the Bishop of London, The Right Reverend and Right Honourable Richard Chartres, delegates certain responsibilities. The Bishops are assisted by Archdeacons. Archdeaconries are further divided into deaneries which are groups of parishes.

Also:

For more than one thousand four hundred years, a cathedral dedicated to St Paul has stood at the highest point in the City. Frequently at the centre of national events, traditions have been observed here and radical new ideas have found expression under the iconic dome. In many cases these events have left some physical record as well as echoes in the intangible memory of the building.

The present Cathedral, the masterpiece of Britain's most famous architect Sir Christopher Wren, is at least the fourth to have stood on the site. It was built between 1675 and 1710, after its predecessor was destroyed in the Great Fire of London, and services began in 1697.
This was the first cathedral to be built after the English Reformation in the sixteenth-century, when Henry VIII removed the Church of England from the jurisdiction of the Pope and the Crown took control of the life of the church. The three hundred year old building is therefore a relative newcomer to a site which has witnessed Christian Worship for over one thousand four hundred years. This brief history looks at just a few of the individuals and events which have shaped the history of St Paul’s Cathedral.

604–1559
Foundation, Loss and Reconstruction
Medieval Splendour

1560–1711
Reformation to Conflagration
A New Cathedral for London

1712–1905
Perilous Painting and Memorialising the Greats
St Paul's in the Age of Industry

1906 to present
Strengthening the Dome and Defending the Cathedral
Royal Events and Social Reformers

The Wikipedia website tells us about St Paul's:

St Paul's Cathedral, London, is a Church of England cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of London and mother church of the Diocese of London. It sits at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London. Its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604. The present church, dating from the late 17th century, was designed in the English Baroque style by Sir Christopher Wren. Its construction, completed within Wren's lifetime, was part of a major rebuilding program which took place in the city after the Great Fire of London.

The cathedral is one of the most famous and most recognisable sights of London, with its dome, framed by the spires of Wren's City churches, dominating the skyline for 300 years. At 365 feet (111 m) high, it was the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1962, and its dome is also among the highest in the world. In terms of area, St Paul's is the second largest church building in the United Kingdom after Liverpool Cathedral.

St Paul's Cathedral occupies a significant place in the national identity of the English population. It is the central subject of much promotional material, as well as postcard images of the dome standing tall, surrounded by the smoke and fire of the Blitz. Important services held at St Paul's include the funerals of Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher; Jubilee celebrations for Queen Victoria; peace services marking the end of the First and Second World Wars; the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, the launch of the Festival of Britain and the thanksgiving services for the Golden Jubilee, the 80th Birthday and the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II. St Paul's Cathedral is a busy working church, with hourly prayer and daily services.

In the designing of St Paul's, Christopher Wren had to meet many challenges. He had to create a fitting cathedral to replace Old St Paul's, both as a place of worship and as a landmark within the City of London. He had to satisfy both the requirements of the church and the tastes of a royal patron. As well as respecting the essentially Medieval tradition of English church building that had grown and developed to accommodate the liturgy, Wren was familiar with contemporary Renaissance and Baroque trends in Italian architecture, and had visited France, where he studied the work of François Mansart.

St Paul's went through five general stages of design. The first survives only in the form of a part of a model and a single drawing. The scheme (usually called the First Model Design) appears to have consisted of a circular domed vestibule (possibly based on the Pantheon in Rome) and a rectangular church of basilica form. The plan may have been influenced by the Temple Church. It was rejected because it was not thought "stately enough" Wren's second design was a Greek cross, which was thought by the clerics not to fulfil the requirements of Anglican liturgy.

Wren's third design is embodied in the "Great Model" of 1673. The model, made of oak and plaster, cost over £500 (approximately £32,000 today) and is over 13 feet (4 m) tall and 21 feet (6 m) long. This design retained the form of the Greek Cross design but extended it with a nave. His critics, members of a committee commissioned to rebuild the church and members of the clergy, decried the design as being too dissimilar from other English churches to suggest any continuity within the Church of England. Another problem was that the entire design would have to be completed all at once because of the eight central piers that supported the dome, instead of being completed in stages and opened for use before construction finished, as was customary. Wren considered the Great Model his favourite design, and thought it a reflection of Renaissance beauty. After the Great Model, Wren resolved to make no more models or publicly expose his drawings, which he found to do nothing but "lose time, and subject his business many times, to incompetent judges".

Wren's fourth design is known as the Warrant design because it was affixed a Royal warrant for the rebuilding. In this deign Wren sought to reconcile Gothic, the predominant style of English churches, to a "better manner of architecture." It has the longitudinal Latin Cross plan of a medieval cathedral. It is of one and a half storeys and has classical porticos at the west, and transept ends, influenced by Inigo Jones’s addition to Old St Paul's. It is roofed at the crossing by a wide shallow dome supporting a drum with a second cupola from which rises a spire of seven diminishing stages. Vaughan Hart has suggested that influenced may have been drawn from the oriental pagoda in the design of the spire. Although not used at St Paul's, the concept was applied in the spire of St Bride's, Fleet Street. This plan was rotated slightly on its site so that it aligned not with true east, but with sunrise on Easter of the year construction began. This small change in configuration was informed by Wren's knowledge of astronomy.

St Paul's Cathedral is built in a restrained Baroque style which represents Wren's rationalisation of the traditions of English Medieval cathedrals with the inspiration of Palladio, the Classical style of Inigo Jones, the Baroque style of 17th-century Rome, and the buildings by Mansart and others that he had seen in France. It is particularly in its plan that St Paul's reveals Medieval influences. Like the great Medieval cathedrals of York and Winchester, St Paul's is comparatively long for its width, and has strongly projecting transepts. It has much emphasis on its facade, which has been designed to define rather than conceal the form of the building behind it. In plan, the towers jut beyond the width of the aisles as they do at Wells Cathedral. Wren's brother was the Bishop of Ely, and Wren was familiar with the unique octagonal lantern tower over the crossing of Ely Cathedral which spans the aisles as well as the central nave, unlike the central towers and domes of most churches. Wren adapted this characteristic in designing the dome of St Paul's. In section St Paul's also maintains a medieval form, having the aisles much lower than the nave, and a defined clerestory.

The transepts each have a semi-circular entrance portico. Wren was inspired in the design by studying engravings of Pietro da Cortona's Baroque facade of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome. These projecting arcs echo the shape of the apse at the eastern end of the building.