Westminster Cathedral
The site on which the cathedral stands in the City of Westminster was purchased by the Diocese of Westminster in 1885, and construction was completed in 1903. Westminster Cathedral is the largest Catholic church building in England and Wales and the seat of the Archbishop of Westminster.
Francis Petre
That Wellington's principal Roman Catholic Cathedral is today a small, but quite perfect, Romano-Grecian temple is entirely the result of chance. The Sacred Heart Basilica, now a cathedral, was originally designed and conceived as a church to mark the site of the fire-gutted St Mary's Cathedral. Petre had strong family connections to the site, as it and an adjacent plot, now the site of St Mary's College, had been given to the Roman Catholic Church by his father and grandfather. The original cathedral, a grand Gothic structure complete with flying buttresses, had been built in 1850 but was destroyed by fire in 1898. Within two days Petre had been asked to design a new church on the site. A decision was taken, however, to build the new Cathedral nearer the more densely populated areas of Wellington, Te Aro and Newtown. Petre later published plans for this Cathedral in 1903, describing his proposed structure as "Roman, bordering on to Florentine Renaissance, treated liberally". This cathedral project never came to fruition, but what was quickly constructed was the Church, or Basilica, of "The Sacred Heart" on the razed cathedral site.