Cathedral of St Paul’s is an Anglican cathedral in Wellington, at the corner of Hill Street and Molesworth Street, immediately north of the Parliament Precinct.
The cathedral building is quite unusual. It was designed in the 1930s by Cecil Wood, who was influenced by Art Deco architecture and style and the neo-Byzantine style of the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral in London. The result was an 88-metre long, 18-metre high building in a striking orange/brown colour with obvious deco tones. Construction in reinforced concrete began in 1954 but was only completed in 1998, having been delayed by WW2.
The church also envisioned the cathedral as a war memorial, apparent when you enter it, with a prominent Gallipoli commemoration. The unusual modernist renditions of ghostly angels in the glasswork at the entrance are also a feature.
An Anglican Church of St Paul is almost as old as Wellington. The first one was where the Beehive is today. Almost immediately, the first settlers started to build a larger cathedral out of brick, but the earthquake of 1855 put paid to this project. Instead, a new project began and resulted in what is now known as "Old St Paul's". This was built out of wood and operational as a cathedral by1866. It lost its status as a cathedral in 1964 when the Cathedral of St Paul’s. was sufficiently completed. Old St Paul’s is on Mulgrave Street, a short walk east from the cathedral along Aitken Street or Pipitea Street.
