The building was designed by Dundee-born architect George Mathewson and opened on 7 August 1836, making it the oldest Catholic church in Dundee. At a time when Catholic emancipation was still recent history -- the Relief Act had passed only seven years earlier in 1829 -- the construction of a substantial Catholic church in a Scottish industrial city was itself a statement. Mathewson gave it a Victorian Gothic facade that announced its purpose without ostentation. With a seating capacity of about 1,000, it served the city's Catholic community for nearly a century before being formally dedicated as a cathedral on 4 February 1923, becoming the seat of the Bishop of Dunkeld and the mother church of the Diocese of Dunkeld within the Province of St Andrews and Edinburgh.

The cathedral's most distinctive architectural feature -- its elevated sanctuary -- is the result of practical improvisation rather than grand design. The presbyterium, containing the high altar and the stalls for the canons, was added later by the straightforward expedient of knocking out the back wall and building on top of the clergy house. The result is a sanctuary area significantly higher than the main body of the cathedral, reached by steps that separate the congregation from the altar in a way that feels both medieval and accidental. This layered construction gives St Andrew's an intimate quality that larger, purpose-built cathedrals sometimes lack. The building bears the marks of its history, each modification a response to the growing needs of a community that outpaced the original architect's vision.

St Andrew's sits at what was once the western edge of the town's almshouse, a charitable institution that survived until the 16th century. The cathedral's location in the West End places it slightly apart from Dundee's industrial waterfront and its more famous landmarks -- the V&A museum, the Tay bridges, the Discovery Point. But that distance is part of its character. While the city reinvented itself around jute mills and whaling ships and, more recently, biomedical research and video game design, St Andrew's continued its primary function unchanged. The cathedral remains an active parish church, holding regular services for a diocese that stretches across a large swathe of eastern Scotland. In a city that has experienced more reinvention than most, St Andrew's is a reminder that some institutions persist not through transformation but through quiet continuity.