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Llandaff Cathedral stands on one of the oldest Christian sites in Britain. In the sixth century St Dyfrig founded a community close to the ford where the Roman road crossed the river Taff. He was succeeded by St Teilo and then Teilo’s nephew, St Euddogwy. These three Celtic Saints remain patron saints of the present Cathedral and are represented by the three mitres in the Cathedral badge. Nothing remains of the original church but a Celtic Cross that stood nearby can still be seen near the door of the Chapter House.

The present cathedral dates from 1107 when Bishop Urban, the first Bishop appointed by the Normans, instigated the building of a much larger church. The arch behind the High Altar was built at that time and the doorway that now leads to the St David (or Welsh Regiment) Chapel may have been the West door of Urban’s church until it was moved to its new site when the Cathedral was extended and widened and a new West front built about 1220. This West front is judged by many to be one of the two or three most notable mediaeval works of art in Wales.

Later in the 13th century the Chapter House was built and also before the century ended the Lady Chapel which has largely escaped the damage and decay that the cathedral sustained over the following 700 years. In the 14th century came the replacement of the Norman windows by new ones in the Decorated style; then, before the end of the 15th Century came the building, by Jasper Tudor, of the North West tower as a new home for the Bells which had previously been housed in a detached Bell Tower, now ruined. This Bell Tower had been built two hundred years earlier at the top of a small hill which in pre-Norman times provided the original church and community that lived around it with security from the unwelcome attention of marauders sailing up the Bristol Channel little more than a mile away.

Until the time of King Henry VIII, Jasper Tudor’s kinsman, pilgrims thronged to the shrine of St Teilo whose tomb still stands in the sanctuary, and their gifts supported the church. When pilgrims were forbidden and other revenues taken away it was no longer possible to maintain the building adequately and over the next 200 years it fell into a state of near-ruin.

In 1734 restoration began in the popular style of the day but the "Italian Temple" which John Wood, the Bath architect, planned to construct in the fabric of the mediaeval cathedral was never quite completed and the original walls and pillars - or such of them as were still standing - still remained. A hundred years later, new life and growing prosperity in the Diocese made possible a fresh restoration undertaken by J F Seddon and John Pritchard. To them we owe much of the present structure including the South West tower and spire, completed in 1869, which replaced the early-12th century tower which collapsed in 1722.

A great deal of the 19th century work inside the Cathedral perished when the building was heavily damaged and the roof destroyed in the 1939-45 War. Its restoration was entrusted to George Pace who aimed at blending new work with what remained of the old and at giving the Cathedral a sense of spaciousness which it previously lacked. The High Altar was lowered and the triptych of the Seed of David by D G Rossetti which stood behind it was moved to a new position in the St Illtyd Chapel at the foot of the North West tower. Pace built the Welch Regiment Memorial Chapel but his greatest achievement is the reinforced concrete arch surmounted by Sir Jacob Epstein’s aluminium statue of Christ in Majesty which stands between the Nave and the Choir and "breaks", without interrupting, the view of the whole building from the top of the steps inside the West door to Geoffrey Webb?s Jesse window at the East end of the Lady Chapel.