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Travel Is Awesome In the United Kingdom!
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This page might be more accurately called the First, and Second, and Third St Paul's. While in the 20th century St Paul's has been blessed with good fortune during times when disaster could have struck (during the bombing of London during the Second World War for instance) in it's early days it was not as fortunate. "Old St Paul's" did not being it's birth until 1087, before that time there were three separate churches standing as "The First" St Paul's. The first church, built of wood in 604 AD, was ordered built by King Aethelbert (Ethelbert) of Kent to be used as the home of Mellitus, the first Bishop of the East Saxons. It was dedicated to the areas Patron Saint, Paul. The building was used as a place of worship for Christians until the death of King Aethelbert in 616 and the Christian clerics were forced to leave London. It's not clear, at least to me, what the building was used for until 675 AD when it burned down.
Incarnation three was made mostly of stone in the hopes of avoiding fire but it too succumbed to flames during a fire in 1087. Buildings one and two are usually combined, somehow, and are called the first St Paul's and building number three has been given, in some places, the title of the "second St Paul's". More often all three tend to be lumped together as "the First St Paul's". No, I don't know why.
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Ten years later
(685) Bishop Erkenwald erected a
second St Paul's, again of wood, on the same spot. This incarnation lasted
until 962 AD when Viking invaders decided the world would be a better place
without it and tore it to the ground.