Cathédrale Sainte-Cécile

Sainte-Cécile was begun in 1282, after the Albigensian crusade, and it was built to look like what it was: a statement of authority. From outside it is a single sheer block of red brick with round buttresses like drum towers, almost no windows low down and a bell tower that reads as a keep. Nothing else in France looks like it. Inside, the whole vault is covered in Renaissance blue and gold painted by Bolognese artists in the early sixteenth century, and a huge Last Judgement fills the west wall.

Outside, work the south side and the west front in late afternoon, when the sun comes round and the brick shifts from dull rose to deep red. The steps and the fortified porch give scale — put two people at the foot of a buttress and the building does the rest. Under a white summer sky at noon the same wall photographs flat and grey.

Inside is free to enter and the nave is enormous, but it is low-light work: a fast lens, no flash, and expect ISO in the thousands. The choir and the carved rood screen are ticketed separately.

It is an active cathedral. Services come first, the parish sets its own rules on tripods and on anything that looks like a commercial shoot, and the rules change with the season — one email a few days ahead saves an argument at the door.