About Nell Braithwaite
I am Nell Braithwaite. I have guided walks in the City of London since 2013, I live in Clerkenwell, and I walk past St Paul’s on most working days. This site is mine. It compares the ways of getting into the cathedral and sends you to GetYourGuide to book. I am not the cathedral, I do not sell tickets and I have no connection to any tour operator listed here.
Why the site exists
Standing in the churchyard, I get asked the same four questions. Is it free? Services are; sightseeing is not. Is there a lift to the top? No, and there are 528 steps. Is it open on Sunday? Not for general sightseeing. And why is that queue so long? Because the people in it did not book online. Writing the answers down felt more efficient than repeating them until I retire.
The third question is the one that ruins afternoons. Doors open at 8.30am Monday to Saturday, the last sightseeing entry is usually around 4pm, and the dome galleries shut to new climbers before the cathedral does. I have watched a lot of people arrive at half past four on a Sunday with tickets they cannot use. The opening hours page exists so that stops happening to you.
How I write it
Facts about the building, the access arrangements and the hours come from the cathedral itself, and the official site is stpauls.co.uk. Where a date or a time matters I say where it comes from and I tell you to check the calendar, because services and events move things. Ratings and review counts are GetYourGuide’s, quoted as published on the day I wrote the page, and I say plainly when a score is built on nine reviews rather than eleven thousand. That distinction runs through everything in the reviews section.
Opinions are mine and they are labelled as such. The Whispering Gallery is the overrated one. The Stone Gallery is where the view actually opens up. The crypt deserves more of your time than most visitors give it, and I have said why on what to see inside.
Why there are no prices on this site
You will not find a single figure typed into these pages. Ticket tiers change, operators reprice, and a number written in August is wrong by October, at which point it stops being information and becomes a trap. What the pages do instead is explain the structure — the tiers, the optional donation, who gets in free, which discounts exist — and let the live booking widget show you the current figure. That reasoning is set out on what a ticket covers.
How the site is paid for
If you book through a link here, GetYourGuide pays me a commission and you pay exactly what you would have paid going there directly. That is the whole business model, and the affiliate disclosure spells out the mechanics. It does not decide which tickets I recommend, for the plain reason that recommending the wrong one is how a site like this stops being read.
Found something out of date, or think I have a fact wrong? Tell me. I would rather fix it.