It’s time for a fix-up at Palace of Westminster
LONDON — The Palace of Westminster, with its cinematic Big Ben clock, set beside the River Thames, is a survivor — of epic fire, German bombs, sulfuric smog and bad plumbing.
An eccentric masterwork of Victorian genius, its dual chambers for lords and commoners are the living, breathing heart of constitutional monarchy, the home of Parliament, and one of the most photographed buildings in the world.
But Westminster is wreck, its caretakers say.
The palace is not falling down. Not at all. Its bones, the superstructure, are solid enough, and carrying on, in British fashion, even if its dermis of Yorkshire limestone is spotty.
Rather, Westminster is rotting from the inside, its water and waste pipes sclerotic, its ventilation shafts congested, its neural networks — the communication, electric, fire systems — nearly shot.
And so earlier this year, after a decade of delay, study and debate, British lawmakers approved one of the most ambitious restoration projects of the modern age, a $5 billion scheme that would see the entire Parliament — the lawmakers, clerks, staff, guards, journalists, bartenders, everybody — decamp to nearby buildings for six years while a massive refurbishment is undertaken.
It’s like redoing your kitchen, times a million.
Or imagine the U.S. Congress emptying out of the Capitol to reconvene at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
The work is scheduled to begin in 2025, with the hope that, sometime in the early 2030s, Parliament will return to its home.
The Washington Post wrangled an invitation to tour the guts of Westminster — guided by Tom Healey, director of the restoration and renewal program, and Robert Stewart, lead engineer for the same.
Our journey began when we stepped into an aging retrofitted elevator the size of an upright coffin to descend to the Dickensian depths.
“Watch your heads!” Healey called upon entering the dank catacombs. Here, even a short man walks the claustrophobic corridors bent over.
Floors above our heads, in the spectacular legislative halls, central lobby, gardens and grand rooms, Westminster is a dusty jewel, a stage set. But a keen eye can spot the symptoms of decrepitude.
The roofs leak, badly — sometimes there are buckets to catch the weepy drip in the Lords chamber. Moths are nibbling at Augustus Pugin’s wallpaper, mice scurrying across the encaustic tiles, and bad humors rising from the bowels below, where an 1880s sewage ejector plays the role of Sisyphus, condemned to spend its eternity trying to keep up with the flushing loos above.
Which are failing, by way.
One of the classic complaints came from Ben Bradshaw, a member of Parliament for the Labour Party, who tweeted, “Urine seems to be pouring through the ceiling into my Commons office for the second day running!”
The original medieval palace mostly burned down in 1834.
The competition to create a purpose-built home for Parliament was awarded to the architect Charles Barry, with construction the contracted to steam-powered railroad builders, who began in 1840, finished in 1870 — only 26 years overdue with a tripling of the budget.
The Westminster complex covers eight acres and has more than 125 staircases and 1,100 rooms and almost three miles of passageways.
The palace sees thousands of staff and lawmakers a day pass through and a million visitors a year. The kitchens serve up to 3,000 meals a day in the oldschool dining rooms, another 2,500 in the modern cafeteria, and untold cups of tea. There are eight bars. The palace is alive. “Westminster does feel like a living presence, an organic machine for making legislation,” said Caroline Shenton, the former director of the Parliamentary Archives and author of “Mr. Barry’s War,” the story of rebuilding of the palace after the 1834 fire.
“This is a body that does stuff,” she said.
But its current state, she told The Post, is “a legacy of generations of neglect,” by all previous governments and departments. “Instead of ever removing the obsolete, they just added to it,” Shenton said.
It’s in the basements where the truth lies.
We saw a bewildering maze of custom-bent pipe and postwar landlines that dated to Winston Churchill’s time. Someone had covered junction boxes with plastic bags. There were odors. Moist things. Miles of confused wire.
The engineers confessed that there had been so many ad hoc repairs and workarounds over the past halfcentury that no one was sure what went where.
“We can have an educated guess,” said Stewart, pointing at a mass of water, electric, Internet and phone lines.