Power & Politics

A political history of Britain in the places where it happened: parliament and palace, courts and counting houses, and the streets where people pushed back.

Tell us what we can do better, or what you’re trying to discover.

Parliament Square statues

Legislature, court, government and abbey on four sides, and a running argument on the grass.

Government & ParliamentIdeas & memoryFree to enter

Photo by Matt Brown from London, England, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in Art and Monuments & Ruins.

Almost every kind of British authority meets at this one junction: Parliament on one side, the Supreme Court on another, the government departments behind, Westminster Abbey at the corner. The square filled with statesmen through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - Churchill, Peel, Disraeli, Lloyd George - and then began to argue with itself. Gandhi and Mandela stand within sight of the Parliament whose empire they broke with. Millicent Fawcett, who led the constitutional campaign for votes for women while the Pankhursts led the militant one, arrived only in 2018: the first woman here, by Gillian Wearing, the first sculptor here who was a woman, holding a banner reading 'Courage calls to courage everywhere', with the faces of other campaigners set into the plinth.

Where
Parliament Square, SW1P 3JX
Nearest station
Westminster · 2 min walk

NearbyPower & Politics

NearbyOther Categories

See more nearby listings

Submit a correction for this listing.

Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

Which area are you in?