The Most Beautiful Churches Seen on Screen in the United Kingdom
9 places · updated 5 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful churches seen on screen in the United Kingdom are Lincoln Cathedral, St Paul's Cathedral and Canterbury Cathedral. The list covers 9 churches seen on screen. Last updated 5 October 2026.
Britain's medieval cathedrals have a second career on screen. They survived the Reformation largely intact, kept their cloisters, chapter houses and great stone vaults, and are used to welcoming productions, so they appear again and again in period dramas and fantasy films, often standing in for other buildings. Watching them in film is a good way to see English Gothic in all its variety, from Norman bulk to Perpendicular lace.
Lincoln Cathedral, whose central spire once made it the tallest building in the world, doubled for Westminster Abbey in The Da Vinci Code. Gloucester Cathedral's cloister, with the earliest surviving fan vaulting, became the corridors of Hogwarts, and Durham, the great Norman cathedral above the River Wear, lent its cloister to the first Harry Potter film. St Paul's, rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666, has its own screen history, from royal weddings to the Divination staircase of Hogwarts.
Ely Cathedral, the Ship of the Fens with its timber and glass octagon, stood in for Westminster Abbey in The King's Speech. Wells is known for its scissor arches and a west front once filled with hundreds of statues, Salisbury for the tallest spire in Britain and one of the four surviving originals of Magna Carta, and Canterbury for the shrine of Thomas Becket. Westminster Abbey itself has been seen by more people than any of them, as the setting of televised coronations and royal weddings since 1953.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lincoln Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 2 | St Paul's Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 3 | Canterbury Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 4 | Gloucester Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 5 | Salisbury Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 6 | Wells Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 7 | Westminster Abbey | Church building | ✓ |
| 8 | Ely Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 9 | Durham Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
01 Lincoln Cathedral
United Kingdom53.234° N 0.536° W
Image by TimHill from Pixabay The Victorian critic John Ruskin thought Lincoln Cathedral the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles, worth any two other English cathedrals, and on its ridge above the flat Lincolnshire countryside it is easy to see why he said it. The first cathedral was begun in 1072 by the Norman bishop Remigius and consecrated in 1092.
Did you know? The cathedral stood in for Westminster Abbey in The Da Vinci Code after the abbey refused filming, and for Notre-Dame in Ridley Scott's Napoleon (2023).
02 St Paul's Cathedral
United Kingdom · 1.9 km from London51.514° N 0.098° W
Image by adchimchaechill from Pixabay St Paul's Cathedral is Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece and the building that gave London its skyline for three centuries. Its dome, rising 111 metres to the cross on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, was the tallest thing in London from 1710 to 1963.
Did you know? The rebuilding was paid for largely by a special tax levied on coal arriving in London, not from the royal purse.
03 Canterbury Cathedral
United Kingdom · 22.2 km from Dover51.280° N 1.083° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by WolfBlur from Pixabay Canterbury Cathedral is the mother church of the Church of England and of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Augustine, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo-Saxons, founded it in 597.
Did you know? Henry VIII reputedly summoned the dead Becket on a charge of treason; when he failed to appear, his shrine's treasures were carted off in two chests and 26 carts.
04 Gloucester Cathedral
United Kingdom51.867° N 2.247° W
Geni · CC BY-SA 4.0 Gloucester Cathedral is best understood as two buildings wearing one skin. The heavy Norman church begun by Abbot Serlo in 1089 still stands underneath — you feel it in the squat round piers of the nave — but in the fourteenth century the monks wrapped its eastern half in a lattice of tall, thin Perpendicular tracery, as if a stone cage had been lowered over the Romanesque walls.
Did you know? The church began as a minster founded around 679 by Osric, King of the Hwicce, with his relative Kyneburg as its first abbess.
05 Salisbury Cathedral
United Kingdom · 37.9 km from Bournemouth51.065° N 1.798° W
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Salisbury Cathedral was built in one go, which is rare for an English cathedral and is what gives it its calm. The foundation stones were laid in 1220 on open meadows by the rivers, after the clergy abandoned the cramped hilltop of Old Sarum a couple of miles to the north, and the nave, transepts and choir were complete by 1258. Only the cloister, the chapter house and, by 1330, the tower and spire were added later.
Did you know? Because the water table beneath the meadows is so high, the cathedral rests on foundations only about four feet (1.2 m) deep.
06 Wells Cathedral
United Kingdom · 27 km from Bristol51.210° N 2.644° W
Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0 Wells is a small market city, and its cathedral is out of all proportion to it. Begun around 1175, it was designed from the start in the new pointed style, and the architectural historian John Harvey called it the first truly Gothic building in Europe. It became a cathedral in the thirteenth century after a long tug-of-war between Wells, Bath and Glastonbury, which is why the bishop is still "of Bath and Wells".
Did you know? The west front is about 45 metres wide and 30 metres high.
07 Westminster Abbey
United Kingdom · 0.7 km from London51.499° N 0.127° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay Westminster Abbey, formally the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster, has been the setting of English and British coronations since 1066: forty monarchs have been crowned here, eighteen are buried here, and at least sixteen royal weddings have taken place since 1100. The site began as a Benedictine monastery founded around 959 on Thorney Island, then an island in the Thames.
Did you know? David Hockney designed a 2018 window celebrating Elizabeth II, a blossoming Yorkshire hawthorn scene, on an iPad to mimic light passing through glass.
08 Ely Cathedral
United Kingdom · 24.2 km from Cambridge52.399° N 0.264° E
Bs0u10e01 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ely Cathedral is called the Ship of the Fens, and on the flat land of Cambridgeshire you understand why: its towers are visible for miles across the drained fields, riding above the little city like a hull on water. It began as an abbey founded in 672 by St Etheldreda, an East Anglian princess, whose shrine drew pilgrims for centuries.
Did you know? Its stone came from Barnack quarries owned by Peterborough Abbey, reportedly paid for with 8,000 eels a year.
09 Durham Cathedral
United Kingdom · 24.2 km from Newcastle upon Tyne54.773° N 1.576° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by jimsumo999 from Pixabay Durham Cathedral stands on a wooded rock almost enclosed by a loop of the River Wear, sharing the peninsula with the castle of the prince-bishops. It was built largely between 1093 and 1133, and UNESCO, listing cathedral and castle together in 1986, called it the largest and most perfect monument of the Norman style in England.
Did you know? Scenes for the first two Harry Potter films were shot here, and the cathedral also appears in Avengers: Endgame.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful churches seen on screen in the United Kingdom?
- On our list, Lincoln Cathedral ranks first, followed by St Paul's Cathedral and Canterbury Cathedral.
- Which cathedral was used in The King's Speech?
- Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire stood in for Westminster Abbey in The King's Speech. It has also appeared in films such as The Other Boleyn Girl.
- Why does Wells Cathedral have scissor arches?
- The strainer arches were inserted in the 1330s and 1340s to brace the crossing piers after the weight of the newly heightened central tower began to cause them to sink and crack.
- Was the 1953 coronation televised?
- Yes. The coronation of Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953 was broadcast on television and watched by millions, for many the first time they had seen television.
- How many churches seen on screen are on this list in the United Kingdom?
- The list covers 9 churches seen on screen.