Who’d sit in a House like this?
Through the keyhole at the temporary House of Commons
MPS got a sneak preview of their temporary new Commons chamber yesterday. An artist’s impression reveals the Alasdair Travers-designed chamber which will house MPs while Westminster undergoes a £6 billion renovation.
Politicians and staff will move out of the crumbling palace in the mid-2020s and return a decade later. This will give workmen time to secure the palace, which has been described as a ‘death trap’.
MPs and staff have been beset by falling masonry, fires, broken toilets and a plague of mice in recent years. MPs will be ‘decanted’ to a replica chamber to be built inside Richmond House, the former Whitehall home of the Department of Health. The Lords will move to the nearby Queen Elizabeth II Centre.
The director of the renovation programme, Tom Healey, said: ‘A few weeks ago we saw water pouring through the ceiling of the chamber and the sitting had to be suspended. The real risk is that sort of incident where either part of the building is damaged by fire or becomes unusable because of water leaks or power failures or whatever.’
But Marcus Binney, president of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, said: ‘The destruction of Richmond House is state-sponsored vandalism of the first order.
‘It is also a grotesque waste of public money to destroy a 30-year-old government building, constructed to an exceptional high specification.’