Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace

Today was all about our visit to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. These are effectively next door to each other, so you finish one tour and your group just lines up for the second.

Our Abbey tour was one and a half hours. Even though this sounds like a pretty good time for a tour of a very large church, it actually wasn't. Our tour guide Emily told us before entering that the Abbey is so full, so utterly choc a block with stuff that you have to be selective on what you stop and look at let alone read, otherwise you'll never get out again. She was right.

Everywhere you look in Westminster Abbey, every nook and cranny has some memorial, some statue, some inscription, or some grave taking up residence there to the point that it can all be a bit intimidating. Emily told us that there are over 3000 graves in the Abbey so we were sure to be walking on graves no matter where we stepped. But the Abbey is beautiful.

It is beautiful in its own way; ancient, colourful, interesting, arresting, awe-inspiring, and as an engineering feat, incredible. Its earliest parts are around 1000 years old.

Highlights for me was seeing Newton's and Stephen Hawking's graves, Poet's Corner, where Browning, Hughes, Larkin, Dr Johnson, Chaucer among many others are all buried. Of course, there are the composers too; Purcell, Vaughan Williams, and Handel, this last a real treat for me.

The vaulted ceiling is so high up, I don't think I've ever seen a cathedral ceiling so high. And it is stunning. The side chapels where various Kings and Queens are buried are very ornate. And the final exhibit was the coronation chair itelf which dates back to Edward the Confessor, the guy who built the Abbey in the first place. It's a plain old wooden chair, but every monarch since has been crowned upon it.

Miraculouly, some might say, Westminster Abbey was spared the bombings during WWII, bar one incendiary bomb which burned straight through its landing site and landed on the floor far below, doing considerable damage, but not destroying the Abbey.

After the Abbey, Westminster Palace, as the Houses of Parliament were origninally a royal residence. Unlike in the Abbey, no photography beyond the Great Hall was allowed, so I have only a few pics to share, but it was a delight. Of especial interest was the process by which the monarch of the day arrives once a year, vests ino full regalia, is recognised by the Lords as he or she passes between them all lined up, then processes into the House of Lords to give the Queen's Speech from the golden throne, a piece of wonderful significance and it must be said, theatre, many of us will have seen televised.

A half hour before the end of our tour, police and security men came running through the building and told us all to evacuate. So, just as our guide Luke was warming up his House of Lords speech, we were ultimately all ushered out of the deep interior and we missed going into the House of Commons. Damn! I was looking forward to that. Before the explanation for the evacuation, I also want to add that much history was offered as we progressed through the building, the edifice itself and its own history helping to shape the history of the nation, including Magna Carta, women's suffrage, the Abolition of Slavery, Cromwell, Guy Fawkes etc. Fascinating stuff.

Turns out that some climate activists from Extinction Rebellion had absconded from a tour and had super glued themselves to the Speaker's chair in the Commons. Some had scaled ramparts outside. Police everywhere, and teleision cameras. I watched it on the news at night, and thought, wow, I was there.

I wish I could have finished my final 25 minutes of the tour, but all in all, it was wonderful. I would go again.Read more