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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.
The coronation church, the battered oak chair built to sit on a conquest, and a transept full of prime ministers.
Monarchy
Also in Performance venues and Royal London and Sacred London.
Every English and British coronation since William the Conqueror in 1066 has happened here. The strangest object in the building is the Coronation Chair, made for Edward I around 1300 as a case for the Stone of Scone, which he had taken from the Scots in 1296 - the symbol of Scottish kingship turned into English furniture. Monarchs have been crowned in it for seven centuries, and Oliver Cromwell used it for his installation as Lord Protector, so its authority outlasted even the abolition of the monarchy. It has survived the Reformation, civil war, schoolboys carving their names into the seat, a suffragette bomb and wartime evacuation. The Stone went home to Scotland in 1996 and comes back for a coronation, as it did in 2023.
The other reason it belongs here is the north transept, which the Abbey itself calls Statesmen's Aisle. It began filling with politicians in the eighteenth century - the monument to William Pitt the Elder, who died in 1778, came first - and by the nineteenth it had become a row of them: Peel, Palmerston, Castlereagh, Disraeli, and Gladstone, whose statue was the last that would fit. After that there was no floor left and the politicians went on the walls instead, which is why Asquith is a wall memorial rather than a statue. Pitt the Younger, still the youngest prime minister Britain has had, is buried with his father but commemorated over the west door. William Wilberforce is in the transept too, and Parliament resolved that he should be: he heard on 26 July 1833 that the bill to end slavery across the empire was certain to pass, and died three days later. He lies next to the Pitts under a stone that gives nothing but his name and two dates, while Samuel Joseph's seated statue of him sits round the corner in the north choir aisle, away from the grave. Among the statesmen, easy to walk past, is a memorial to Jonas Hanway, who is said to have been the first man in England to carry an umbrella.
Monday to Saturday from 09:00 or 09:30; last entry varies by day, £31
Free for services, including evensong most days.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.