I Never Knew That About London

by Christopher Winn

  St Margaret’s, Westminster

  MIDDLESEX GUILDHALL was built in 1913 as the headquarters of Middlesex County Council, and is now used by the Supreme Court of the UK.

  Methodist Central Hall

  Well, I never knew this

  ABOUT

  WHITEHALL

  The CABINET WAR ROOMS below Clive Steps at the end of King Charles Street are an unexpected treat for visitors to Whitehall. Tucked away beneath the Treasury building is a warren of small underground rooms where Winston Churchill and the War Cabinet met during the air raids of the Second World War. Everything is laid out as it was in 1944, including old maps and telephones, and you can even catch a glimpse of the bed set up for Churchill to retire to.

  On the Embankment, between the RAF memorial and Westminster Bridge, is the moving BATTLE OF BRITAIN LONDON MONUMENT, showing battle scenes and names in bronze relief. It was unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 2005, in front of 70 surviving Battle of Britain pilots.

  Bronze-clad PORTCULLIS HOUSE, completed at a cost of £235 million at the end of the 20th century, is THE MOST EXPENSIVE OFFICE BLOCK EVER BUILT IN BRITAIN. Providing conference facilities and offices for 200 MPs, the interior boasts tinkling fountains and water features, fig trees, cafés, a stunning glass-topped atrium and, just in case, padded lifts.

  The flamboyant statue of BOADICEA, Queen of the Iceni, riding her chariot along with her daughters, which stands at the western end of Westminster Bridge, was made by Thomas Thornycroft in 1856 and unveiled in 1902. Prince Albert lent the sculptor two of his horses as models. History does not relate who modelled for Boadicea.

  The Prime Minister who lived for the longest time in No 10. DOWNING STREET was WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER who occupied the house for over 20 years from 1783–1801 and again from 1804 until his death aged 46 in 1806.

  The only occupant of No. 10 Downing Street to be assassinated was the Prime Minister SPENCER PERCEVAL who was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1812. His body lay at No. 10 for five days before his funeral. In 1842 Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s secretary Edmund Drummond was murdered in Whitehall on his way home to Downing Street, being mistaken for Peel by the assassin.

  The first Prime Minister to have a motor car at No. 10 Downing Street was Arthur Balfour in 1903.

  The houses in Downing Street were originally built of yellow brick which over two centuries became blackened by pollution. The bricks were then painted black after restoration work in the early 1960s.

  WESTMINSTER

  WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT

  Westminster Abbey – Britain’s largest and loftiest church

  Westminster Abbey

  A Royal Peculiar

  WESTMINSTER ABBEY OR, more correctly, the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster, is THE LARGEST CHURCH IN BRITAIN, with a total length of 530 ft (162 m). The nave, 103 ft (31 m) high, is THE LOFTIEST NAVE IN BRITAIN.

  The first abbey was built here in 620 by Sebert, King of the East Saxons, on what was then an island in the Thames called Thorney Island. St Peter, on whose instructions the abbey was raised, is said to have appeared at its consecration by Mellitus, the first Bishop of London. On the floor of the Chapter House are depictions of salmon, illustrating the tradition that St Peter rewarded the ferryman who rowed him over to the island with a rich catch.

  In 1050 Edward the Confessor tore down the Saxon abbey and began to build his own ‘minster’ to the ‘west’ of London – his Westminster. He had sworn to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Apostle Peter in Rome, but the Pope released him from the vow on the condition that he raised a great abbey to St Peter, and Edward determined to build the greatest abbey ever seen. He lived just long enough to see the church dedicated in 1065, and ten days later was buried inside his foundation. His shrine has remained at the heart of Westminster Abbey ever since.

  In 1066 William the Conqueror was crowned in the Abbey, setting a precedent that is followed to this day. Every English and British monarch since William has been crowned in Westminster Abbey except for Edward V, who was murdered in the Tower before his coronation, and Edward VIII, who abdicated before his.

  Edward the Confessor was canonised in 1163, and Henry III decided to honour his memory by rebuilding the church in the grand style we see today. Henry was the first king since Edward the Confessor to be buried in the abbey, and from his time until the reign of George III the Abbey was considered the royal burial place of choice.

  In the 14th century the massive nave was finished by Abbot Nicholas Littlington, who also rebuilt the Abbot’s lodgings to include a parlour called the Jerusalem Chamber. In 1413 Henry IV suffered a fit while praying at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, and was taken into the Jerusalem Chamber, where he died, fulfilling a prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem.

  At the start of the 16th century Henry VII’s Chapel was built, and this completed the main structure of the building we see today. This chapel, with its supreme fan vaulting described by Washington Irving as having the ‘wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb’, is considered by many to be the loveliest chapel in England.

  The west towers were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and completed in 1745. So familiar is the profile of the Abbey today, and so well do the towers blend with the older building, that many people are surprised to learn that they are 400 years younger than the main body of the church.

  Monuments

  Princes, Poets and Heroes

  INSIDE, THE ABBEY has more monuments and memorials than any other church in Britain. By the west door is the most poignant of them all, the TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN WARRIOR. No one knows who lies within, just that he was a soldier who fought and died in France and was buried here without a name. His body was brought back and placed here alongside Prime Ministers and Kings, to represent all those who give their lives for their country. The soil for his grave was brought from the battlefields of France, and the marble slab from a quarry near Namur in Belgium. Close by is the grave of David Livingstone, whose body was carried out of the African jungle by his friends.

  The first poet to occupy Poets’ Corner was GEOFFREY CHAUCER. Buried standing upright is the poet BEN JONSON, who couldn’t afford more space, even for his epitaph which reads ‘O rare Ben Jonson’. Near him lies ENGLAND’S OLDEST MAN, THOMAS PARR, a Shropshire farmer who lived from 1485 until 1635. He married at 120 and later came to London to see the King and died of the excitement. Also buried near here are the actors DAVID GARRICK and SIR HENRY IRVING, as well as the first man in England to carry an umbrella, JOSHUA HANWAY, founder of the Marine Society.

  OLIVER CROMWELL was buried in Henry VII’s Chapel in 1658, but two years later Charles II gave the order that his body should be dug up, hanged at Tyburn, beheaded and then flung in a pit to rot. Cromwell’s head was stuck on a pike outside Westminster Hall, where it stayed for 25 years until blown down in a storm and rescued. Through divers means it ended up at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge.

  In the north aisle of Henry VII’s Chapel is the pathetic ‘Innocents’ Corner’, where lie two of James I’s children. Princess Sophia, three days old, is depicted lying in a cradle, and Princess Mary, two years old, is portrayed resting on her elbow. Nearby in a small tomb lie the bones of two children found in the Tower, thought to be the sons of Edward IV, young Edward V and his brother Richard, supposedly murdered on the orders of their uncle, so that he could become Richard III.

  Coronation Chair

  An Ancient Seat

  PERHAPS THE ABBEY’S greatest treasure is St Edward’s Chair, the throne which was made for Edward I in 1300 and on which every monarch has sat during the moment of crowning since then. It was designed originally to encase the Stone of Scone, which Edward had captured from Scotland in 1296 and which John Major returned to Edinburgh in 1996. St Edward’s Chair has left the Abbey just once – when it was removed to Westminster Hall for the installation of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector in 1653. The Stone of Scone also left the Abbey once
, before its final departure, when it was stolen by nationalist students on Christmas Day 1950 and laid symbolically on the altar at Arbroath Abbey.

  Chapter House

  First Parliament

  WESTMINSTER ABBEY’S CHAPTER House, completed in 1259, has the finest medieval tiled floor in England. It also has an important place in English history as ‘the cradle of representative and constitutional government throughout the world’. This is where the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ first met when Henry III’s Great Council took place here on 26 March 1257. Parliament, in the form of the early House of Commons, continued to meet here until 1547, when it moved out to St Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster Palace. The Chapter House remains under the control of Parliament and not the Abbey.

  Palace of Westminster

  Mother of Parliaments

  THE PALACE OF Westminster is BRITAIN’S OLDEST ROYAL PALACE. It was built between Westminster Abbey and the river by Edward the Confessor around 1050. William the Conqueror, once he had established himself at the Tower, took over Westminster, which remained the main royal residence until a fire in 1513 when Henry VIII moved the Court up the road to Whitehall Palace.

  Westminster Hall

  Great Space

  THE OLDEST SURVIVING part of the Palace of Westminster is Westminster Hall, built for William II in 1097 and THE OLDEST CEREMONIAL HALL IN BRITAIN. At 240 ft (73 m) long and 68 ft (21 m) wide, it was, at the time, THE LARGEST HALL IN EUROPE. The roof was originally supported by columns, but these took up valuable space and in 1397 the mighty double hammerbeam roof was added on the orders of Richard II. Reaching a height of 92 ft (28m) and spanning 68 ft (21 m), it is THE LARGEST MEDIEVAL SINGLE-SPAN ROOF IN BRITAIN.

  In 1265 Simon de Montfort’s Great Parliament met with Henry III in Westminster Hall. This was THE FIRST TRUE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT to include elected representatives, two knights from each shire and two leading citizens from the most important towns in England, along with the hereditary rulers.

  From the time of William II until the end of the 19th century Westminster Hall was the home of the law courts, and many of the most famous trials in British history took place here. Edward II was deposed here in 1327, Richard II in 1399. Among those condemned to death here were William Wallace in 1305, Sir Thomas More in 1535 and Guy Fawkes in 1606. A brass tablet on the wide stone steps marks where King Charles I sat during his trial in 1649 – when the silver top fell off his cane, no one stooped to pick it up for him, and at that point the King must finally have realised he was doomed. In 1653 Oliver Cromwell was installed in the hall as Lord Protector, while seated in King Edward’s Coronation Chair which had been brought here from the Abbey.

  Another tablet on the east wall of the hall indicates the position of the door through which Charles I passed when he came to arrest the Five Members in 1641 – the act that finally sealed his fate. ‘I see the birds have flown,’ Charles said and demanded to know where they were. ‘I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me,’ was Speaker Lenthall’s reply, and no monarch has been allowed to set foot in the Commons ever since, except for George VI, who was invited to visit the new chamber when it had been rebuilt after the Second World War.

  Since the law courts moved to the Strand, Westminster Hall has been used for mainly ceremonial occasions. The first person to lie in state here was William Gladstone in 1898, then George VI in 1952, Queen Mary in 1953, Sir Winston Churchill in 1965 and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in 2002. In 1996 Nelson Mandela addressed both Houses of Parliament in the Hall.

  * * *

  The Exchequer

  Westminster Hall was for many years the home of the ‘exchequer’, or treasury. The term exchequer derived from the chequered table, based on the abacus and resembling a chess board, on which counters representing different values were placed and used to calculate expenditure and receipts. Money received by the Treasury was recorded on sticks about 8 inches (20 cm) long, on which notches were made of different sizes according to the amount of money involved. The stick, known as a ‘tally’, from the French ‘taille’ meaning notch or incision, was then cut in two, and one half was kept by the Treasury while the other half was given as a receipt. This is where we derive the expression to ‘tally up’, as in to make agree or correspond. Tallies remained in use until 1833, when the Exchequer was abolished.

  * * *

  St Stephen’s

  Secret

  A DOORWAY ON the east side of Westminster hall opens out on to St Stephen’s Cloister, built for Henry VIII with a rich fan-vaulted roof comparable to that of Henry VII’s Chapel in the Abbey. A staircase from the south-east corner of the hall leads to ST STEPHEN’S CRYPT, known as the church of St Mary Undercroft, again with fine vaulting and where Members of Parliament can be married or have their children christened. In 1911 the suffragette Emily Davidson hid here for two days so that she could fill out her address in the 1911 census as ‘the House of Commons’. She was later killed running in front of the King’s horse in the Derby at Epson

  This stunningly beautiful and secret royal peculiar is the only surviving part of the original St Stephen’s Chapel, which was begun under Henry III, based on the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, and completed under Edward I in 1292. In 1547, after the Reformation, this royal chapel was secularised and became the meeting-place of the Commons, with the Speaker’s chair placed where the altar had been. The custom of bowing to the Speaker’s chair was derived from the tradition of genuflecting to the altar. The antechapel served as the voting lobby where members voting ‘aye’ would go to register while the ‘noes’ would remain in their seats. The modern Commons chamber is based on the layout of St Stephen’s Chapel, which was home to the House of Commons from 1547 until the fire of 1834.

  Fire

  Oops

  AT MIDNIGHT ON 5 November 1605, the staunch Catholic GUY FAWKES was discovered in the crypt underneath the Chamber of the House of Lords, his pockets stuffed with torchwood with which to ignite 20 barrels of gunpowder and blow up King James I and Parliament. Fawkes and eight others were tried and sentenced to death in 1606, and since that time the Yeoman of the Guard has searched the cellars before every State Opening of Parliament. This didn’t help in 1834, when officials retired to the cellars to incinerate the bunches of elmwood sticks or ‘tallies’ that had been used by the Exchequer before it was abolished in 1833. The tallies burned so well that the whole Palace of Westminster went up in flames, and by morning there was nothing left except Westminster Hall and some smouldering ruins.

  New Houses of Parliament

  Towers and Spires

  THE NEW PALACE of Westminster, which opened in 1852, incorporates Westminster Hall and the remains of St Stephen’s Chapel. It was designed by Sir Charles Barry (1795–1860), with the interior work carried out by Augustus Pugin (1812–52). The palace covers 8 acres (3.2 ha), has 11 courtyards, 100 staircases, 2 miles (3.2 km) of passageways and over 1,100 rooms. The river frontage is 940 ft (287 m) long with a 700 ft (213 m) terrace.

  At the south corner stands the VICTORIA TOWER, 75 ft (23 m) square and 336 ft (102 m) high. When it was built it was the biggest and the highest tower in the world. The flagpole is over 50 ft (15 m) tall, and when the flag is displayed to show that Parliament is sitting it flies higher than the cross on the dome of St Paul’s. Inside are kept vellum parchment records of every law passed in England since the 11th century – over three million of them, so far.

  The central spire is 300 ft (91 m) tall and rises above the Central Lobby midway between the chambers of the Lords and Commons. Anyone may come here to ‘lobby’ or meet their MP.

  Big Ben

  The World’s Timepiece

  AT THE NORTH corner stands the CLOCK TOWER, 320 ft (98 m) high, and home to the clock known the world over as BIG BEN. In fact Big Ben refers only to the hour bell of the Great Clock of Westminster, the largest bell ever cast at the Whitechapel Foundry. Big Ben takes its name either from Sir Benjami
n Hall, who was Chief Commissioner of Works when the bell was hung, or from Benjamin Caunt, a popular prize-fight champion of the time, whose nickname was ‘Big Ben’.

  The four clock faces, designed by Pugin, are 180 ft (55 m) above the ground. Each face is 23 ft (7 m) across, each minute hand is 14 ft (4.3 m) long, and the Great Clock of Westminster is THE LARGEST FOUR-FACED CHIMING CLOCK IN THE WORLD.

  The clock’s reputation for reliability stems from the requirements of the Astronomer Royal George Airy that ‘the first stroke of the hour bell should register the time, correct to within one second per day, and furthermore that it should telegraph its performance twice a day to Greenwich Observatory, where a record would be kept.’ The clock’s timekeeping is regulated by adding to or subtracting from a stack of old penny coins carried on the pendulum.

  Big Ben rang out across London for the first time on 31 May 1859.

  Well, I never knew this

  ABOUT

  WESTMINSTER

  Henry VII’s Chapel is the chapel of the MOST HONOURABLE ORDER OF THE BATH which is the premier meritorious Order of the Crown and was instituted in 1725. The Order has a civil and military division, and inclusion in the Military Division is regarded as THE HIGHEST CLASS OF BRITISH MILITARY HONOUR OBTAINABLE. Admission to the Civil Division is through personal services rendered in the performance of public duties or which merit royal favour. Foreigners can be admitted as Honorary Members, and these have included RONALD REAGAN in 1989 and the former Mayor of New York RUDOLPH GIULIANI in 2002.