The building site that lasted 600 years

Cologne Cathedral holds a record I rather love: it took 632 years to build. The first stone went down in 1248, and then, a few centuries in, everyone more or less gave up. The choir was finished, the rest was not, and a huge wooden crane was left standing on the south tower where it had lifted the last of the stone.

That crane stayed there for around three hundred years. The people of Cologne got so used to the sight of it that it became a symbol of the city, and there was even a saying that the world, or at least Cologne, would end when the cathedral was finally finished, which may have taken some of the urgency out of the project. What eventually got it moving again was a discovery: the original medieval plans for the front of the cathedral, missing for centuries, were found. Working from those ancient drawings, builders completed the whole thing to the first architects' design, and in 1880 it was finished at last, briefly the tallest building on earth. A six hundred year building site, finished from its own lost blueprints.

I painted it in watercolour and ink, those twin spires against the grey. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Cologne Cathedral, Cologne · Travel Poster