Westminster Cathedral

Westminster Cathedral tickets: which one to buy

The cathedral is free to enter and asks for a donation. Two things are ticketed. The campanile lift carries visitors 64 metres up St Edward's Tower to a viewing gallery over Victoria and the Thames, and it costs a few pounds. The treasures exhibition in the gallery above the west end holds vestments, plate and relics and charges a similar amount; a combined ticket covers both. Luminiscence, a projection and music show staged inside the nave in the evenings, is a commercial production sold at several times that price and is the only expensive thing on offer here.

Guided tours of Westminster, the district rather than the abbey, sometimes include this cathedral; be careful when booking, because the abbey half a mile away is a different building with a different faith and a much larger ticket. Attending mass or Vespers costs nothing and the choir is among the best in Britain. The Cathedral Hall behind the piazza hosts talks and recitals, and the bookshop at the west end stocks the best range of liturgical music in London.

Visiting Westminster Cathedral: what to see

This is the mother church of Catholic England and Wales, built between 1895 and 1903 after the hierarchy was restored, and John Francis Bentley designed it in a ninth-century Byzantine manner precisely so that it would not compete with the Gothic abbey nearby. It is made of twelve and a half million bricks with bands of Portland stone, without steel or concrete anywhere, and the interior domes are brick too. The plan was to cover every surface in mosaic; the money ran out, so the upper walls and vaults remain bare blackened brick above a lower storey sheathed in more than a hundred kinds of marble.

The contrast is the building's signature and many visitors find the unfinished darkness more powerful than the finished parts. Eric Gill carved the fourteen Stations of the Cross in low relief between 1914 and 1918, and they are among the finest sculptures of the century in England. The eight dark green columns of the nave were cut from the same Thessalian quarry that supplied Hagia Sophia, a deliberate choice by Bentley, who travelled to Italy and Istanbul before drawing a line.

Westminster Cathedral opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from early morning to evening, with services throughout the day and the cathedral closing to sightseeing during the principal mass. The tower lift keeps shorter hours and closes in bad weather. Mornings are quiet, since the crowds in this part of London are all queueing at the abbey. The interior is dark by design and photographs poorly on a dull day; the mosaics in the side chapels are lit on request.

Choral Vespers on Sunday afternoons and the daily sung mass are free and are the best way to hear the acoustics, which are famously long. Photography without flash is allowed. Dress modestly. Allow forty minutes, an hour with the tower. Victoria station is three minutes away, which makes this the easiest major church in London to reach and one of the least visited. The piazza in front was cleared in the 1970s and gives the only full view of the striped campanile, which is otherwise hidden by Victoria Street.