In England's smallest city, Wells was the first cathedral to be built entirely in the Gothic style. Its west front is a great screen of medieval sculpture, and its scissor arches are one of the boldest solutions in all of architecture.
Begun about 1175 and continued to around 1490, Wells broke from the Romanesque entirely, becoming the first English cathedral conceived from the outset in the Gothic manner.
The west front spreads wide as a sculptured screen, once holding some three hundred medieval figures of saints, kings and angels — the richest display of English medieval statuary to survive.
When the central tower began to sink under its own weight, the masons inserted the famous scissor arches about 1338 — great interlocking braces that carry the load with startling grace. A late-fourteenth-century astronomical clock still turns nearby.