Is it the tallest spire in the world?
As I may have mentioned before, the trick when you are talking about -ests is to qualify them. Tall-est building? Tall-est cathedral? Tall-est in the world, Europe, the UK, England, Wiltshire? Tall-est spire made of stone?
So here is the current list of tall-ests, complete with disqualification for comparison with Salisbury:
When the spire took the cathedral’s total height up to 123m some time in the early 1300s it could have briefly been said to be the tallest building in the world, depending on whether or not you count the Great Pyramid of Giza (139m) as a building or simply a very large pile of stones.
Old St Paul’s and Lincoln achieved greater heights at around the same time but didn’t manage to sustain them. Old St Paul’s had a 149m timber and lead spire which fell down after it was struck by lightning in 1561, before the whole cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1665. Lincoln reached 160m also using a central spire made of timber and lead but it collapsed in 1548.
And ever since then Salisbury Cathedral has been the tall-est cathedral in the UK, and indeed it was the tall-est building of any sort in the UK until the Post Office Tower was built in 1964.
Over in France Beauvais reached 153m but the tower fell down in 1573 and the whole project became an object lesson in how to, and how not to, build very high naves.
Strasbourg Cathedral which was topped out in 1439 at 142m claims, with a pointed jibe at Salisbury’s vertical extension, to be the “earliest church to have been the world’s tallest which still stands at its original height”. Ha ha so much for you people who go for a Spire Upgrade. Close inspection of the photo would seem to imply that it is also the tallest cathedral with a penthouse and possibly en-suite swimming pool.
The Basilica Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, with its highest point at 172.5m reached in February 2026 is not a cathedral, despite having something like 17 spires (depending on when you are reading this). But it did replace Ulm Minister, 161.5m completed in 1890 and apparently “intentionally built a few metres taller than Cologne Cathedral” in the quest to be the tall-est church building in the world.
And although the Basilica in Yamoussoukro in the Ivory Coast at 158m is doubly disqualified from our Salisbury-centric -est definition because it is a non-cathedral with a dome, not a spire, it has managed to bag the Guiness Record for the larg-est church by dint of being very wide as well as very tall.
However Cologne Cathedral which was finally completed after a project lasting 630 years in 1880 is irritatingly non-disqualifiable and is therefore officially the tall-est cathedral, sorry Strasbourg. Just to rub salt in the wound, it has two spires each over 157m tall, giving them a spare one just in case. However, as Mr Wikipedia points out, it is handily Not Medieval.
So the scoreboard is:
- Tallest ever church in the UK to be still standing: Salisbury whoo hoo
- Tallest medieval church: Strasbourg
- Tallest cathedral: Cologne
- Tallest church: Sagrada Familia
Follow-up questions might include:
How tall was the cathedral originally?
Where should you put a spire on a cathedral?
Why is Strasbourg Cathedral so interesting?
What happened to Beauvais Cathedral?