It took 11 years to bring Bill Viola to St Paul’s Cathedral – but it was worth it

Deans are a strange breed. Growing up in the Church of England, I met a wide range, their cultural tastes embracing everything from Chagall to In Bed with Madonna. In 2003, I didn’t know what appealed to the then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John Moses, but in April of that year it suddenly became crucial. I was proposing that St Paul’s commission the artist Bill Viola — dubbed by some the Rembrandt of the video age — to create a work for the cathedral. Since Moses had never heard of Viola and I didn’t work in the visual-arts world, it seemed a far-fetched proposition.

Yet I was in no doubt that it should happen. The madness had seized me during a road trip in California, not because of substances I had consumed but because of a visit to the Getty in Los Angeles. It was an extraordinary time. The second Gulf War had just started, and as shock jocks barked out anti-Saddam diatribes on the radio, fighter jets occasionally zoomed overhead on practice manoeuvres before heading out to the Middle East.