Bishop Daniel Wilson pushed it through, largely with his own money, because the older St. John's had become too small. Forbes, a Royal Engineer, designed a Gothic cathedral adapted for the Bengal climate: an exceptionally wide nave, thin iron-trussed roof, and ventilation that treats the building as a machine for surviving May.
The original tower was modelled on Canterbury. The 1897 earthquake took it down, the 1934 Bihar earthquake damaged its replacement, and the present tower follows Bell Harry at Canterbury more cautiously than the first attempt did.
The west window is by Burne-Jones, installed in 1880 and depicting the life of St. Paul. Two Florentine frescoes flank the entrance. There are memorial tablets on almost every surface, and reading them is a compressed social history of who died young in Calcutta and of what.
At Christmas the cathedral and Park Street a few hundred metres away become the same event, and the queue on the lawn runs past midnight.
What the guidebook leaves out
The grounds hold a small, quiet cemetery. It is the coolest place within a kilometre in high summer.
