Old St Paul's Cathedral in length including the portico, and across the transepts, and Winchester Cathedral, the longest remaining medieval church, is long and across the transepts. The cathedral had one of Europe's tallest church spires, the height of which is traditionally given as , surpassing all but Lincoln Cathedral. The King's Surveyor, Christopher Wren (1632–1723), judged that an overestimate and gave . William Benham noted that the cathedral probably "resembled in general outline that of Salisbury, but it was a hundred feet longer, and the spire was sixty or eighty feet higher. The tower was open internally as far as the base of
Spire In the early Renaissance the spire was not restricted to the United Kingdom: the fashion spread across Europe. After the destruction of the 135 m tall spire of the St. Lambert's Cathedral, Liège in the 19th century, the 123 m spire of Antwerp is the tallest ecclesiastical structure in the low countries . Between 1221 and 1457 richly decorated open spires were built for the Cathedral of Burgos in Spain while at Ulm Cathedral in Germany the 529-foot (161-m) spire built in the imported French Gothic style between 1377 and 1417 ultimately failed. The Italians never really embraced the spire