St Paul's Cathedral rises at the top of Dunedin's Octagon looking every inch the finished cathedral, until you learn it very nearly wasn't. Architect Edmund Anscombe drew up a Gothic Revival design complete with a soaring spire, and workers laid the foundation stone in 1915. Then money ran short, the ground beneath proved worryingly soft, and the spire was quietly abandoned. The rest of the building took until the 1970s to complete, making this one of New Zealand's longest church-building sagas.

Inside, the vaulted nave and stained glass are matched by a large pipe organ, still one of the cathedral's proudest features. As seat of the Anglican Diocese of Dunedin, it anchors the city's civic heart as firmly as any council chamber.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours pass the cathedral on their walk through the Octagon, pairing it with the nearby Robbie Burns statue to trace Dunedin's Scottish civic identity in stone.