Saint Patrick's Cathedral

This guide to Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Auckland follows Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand's first Labour prime minister, whose coffin sat unburied in a side chapel here for three years after his death in office in 1940, while stonemasons finished his clifftop tomb. It traces the cathedral's own improvised history, from a wooden chapel granted to a French bishop in the 1840s on land gifted by Ngati Whatua, through the tower and nave built in the 1880s. Look down as you walk the aisle for the glass floor panel revealing the original 1848 foundations.