Durham Cathedral: Readers choice for Britain's best building

When we asked readers of the Guardian to choose their favourite building in Britain, from across history and right across the country, this is the one they picked. It's a place of swords and soldiery, of dungeons and death, of some of the greatest architectural highs in the country and some of its architectural lows. There are terrible tales and stories here and true magnificence. This building is Durham Cathedral. This is pure architectural sorcery, perhaps the greatest Norman or Romanesque building in Europe. When William the Conqueror came here with his Norman armies after the Battle of Hastings, they wanted to impose their political as well as ecclesiastical might on Northumbria, on this part of northern England bordering Scotland. Because William thought of himself as a latter-day Roman king or Roman emperor, he wanted to build on a scale that the Romans built on. So this cathedral was built almost exactly to the same size and scale as old St Peter's in Rome. We call the style of this building Norman or Romanesque. Intriguingly, the Roman style it comes from is not directly from ancient Rome itself, but from Byzantium. The point is, is that this style had developed in the Eastern Roman Empire and it came slowly back into Western Europe through Ravenna and then through the court of Charlemagne, the holy Roman emperor in Aachen in what's now Germany. It was that architecture that then moved its way across Normandy and came with William through into England and right up here into Northumbria. The heart of this new cathedral, its choir, its nave, its transepts grew up remarkably quickly between 1093 and 1133. After that it rose and grew over the next few hundred years, culminating in this great central tower hundreds of feet above the river Weir, completed in 1500. That's just 40 years before Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and great cathedrals like this. Durham though was special and Henry was a little bit gentler with it than he was with other cathedrals and monasteries. Why is that? Well the answer lies over there and it's called Scotland. England was quite rightly fearful of invasion from north of the border and from its very beginning Durham Cathedral was always as much a place of worship as it was a fortress against the Scots. This is a masterpiece because the proportion of this building, its form, is so right and I wonder whether Guardian readers aren't responding to something that's quite difficult to put into words but that is to do with a whole combination of factors. Architecture, landscape, history, heritage, spirituality, all these things have gone into making this the wonderful building that it is. A little Latin Hac sunt in fossa, bidai venerabilis ossa. This rhyming couplet means in this tomb lie the bones of the venerable Bede. Bede is one of the reasons to come to Durham Cathedral for Bede was the first great English historian and the tomb, this great black slab of marble, is set in an extraordinary chapel. It's known as the Galilee Chapel and it's one of the great works of the late 12th century. The chapel also has a great religious significance. The very name Galilee suggests that this was the point, metaphysically, that Jesus Christ left the shores of Galilee to make his last journey to his crucifixion and resurrection in Jerusalem. The Galilee Chapel is that point where people came into the cathedral and moved slowly up to the great altar and it's behind that altar that Cuthbert is buried. The cathedral has two hearts beating close together. On the other side of the screen is the high altar, the celebration of the life and passion, death and resurrection of Christ and on this side Christ's servant Cuthbert, the humble Lindisfarne monk whose bones here have become the heart of the cathedral and the very reason why it was built in the first place. One of the most important architectural moments in Durham Cathedral is the ribbed stone vault crowning the nave. This is probably the very first of its kind not just in Britain but in Europe and it marked a structural engineering and architectural revolution. Why did the masons do it? Well they were trying to create the lightest possible stone vault they could across this great wide space and in doing so they pointed their way to a new architectural style, the Gothic, that was to follow the Romanesque. This is a gallery right above the crossing of the church, the central part of the cruciform plan of the cathedral and here you can hear the music, the song of the cathedral coming up loud and clear up from the organ right up to this great lofty vault above us. This is a peephole that looks straight down to the heart of the crossing of the cathedral so it's a very very long way down there indeed but the view is magnificent and also the wind is howling up it's almost blowing my hand look at that. The most terrifying moment in the cathedral's military history came in 1650 after the Battle of Dunbar where Oliver Cromwell defeated the Scots. He brought 3,000 Scottish prisoners of war down from Scotland to Durham Cathedral and locked them in without food, without water. The soldiers burnt every last piece of woodwork they could find in the cathedral except for a solitary wooden thistle that reminded them of course of Scotland and of home and that still stands on the great cathedral clock in the transept. Of course Durham Cathedral is a favourite building how could it not be it is utterly magnificent it's one of those buildings that raises the spirit whilst coseting and nurturing us. The big question is does it have a relevance to architects and us today as we plan buildings for the future well I think it does because apart from the beautiful craftsmanship in the building apart from the play of light through its windows on its great stones apart from this glorious sense of detail and richness and spirituality it's a building that has a story to tell. All great buildings have a story to tell but Durham has more than one more than even a Durham has a whole bible of stories to tell us.