Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey, formally the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster, has been the setting of English and British coronations since 1066: forty monarchs have been crowned here, eighteen are buried here, and at least sixteen royal weddings have taken place since 1100. The site began as a Benedictine monastery founded around 959 on Thorney Island, then an island in the Thames. Edward the Confessor rebuilt it from 1042 as his burial church, in the Romanesque style and to the first cruciform plan in England, and he is buried inside. After the dissolution of the monasteries, Elizabeth I made it a royal peculiar in 1560, a church answerable directly to the sovereign rather than a bishop.

The present building was begun in 1245 by Henry III, who wanted a shrine for Edward to rival the great French cathedrals, and it follows French models such as Reims more than contemporary English Gothic. The vault of the nave, at about 102 feet (31 m), is one of the highest in Britain, and the transepts are unusually long so that more guests can fit in for coronations. The nave was finished over the following two centuries to the original design, and the western towers were added only in the 1740s by Nicholas Hawksmoor and John James. At the east end, the Henry VII Chapel, built from 1503, has a pendant fan-vaulted ceiling so intricate that the antiquary John Leland called it the wonder of the world.

The interior is the densest gathering of history in England. Behind the high altar lies the shrine of Edward the Confessor, the only major English saint whose body still rests in his shrine. In front of it the Cosmati pavement, about 700 years old and made of almost 30,000 pieces of coloured glass and stone, marks the spot where monarchs are crowned; the Coronation Chair was made for Edward I to hold the Stone of Scone, seized from Scotland in 1296. Elizabeth I and her half-sister Mary I share one tomb in the Henry VII Chapel, with Mary, Queen of Scots nearby. Poets' Corner in the south transept began with Geoffrey Chaucer around 1400; a cluster of scientists, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking among them, lies around the tomb of Isaac Newton; and just inside the Great West Door is the grave of the Unknown Warrior from the First World War. More than 3,300 people are buried here.

Beyond the church, the octagonal Chapter House of 1250–59 keeps benches for 80 monks, and the 11th-century Pyx Chamber was a royal treasury. Since 2018 the Weston Tower, designed by the abbey's surveyor Ptolemy Dean, has given access by lift and stair to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries, which display the abbey's treasures in the medieval triforium high above the floor. Together with the Palace of Westminster and St Margaret's Church, the abbey has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

Getting there

The abbey stands beside Parliament Square in the City of Westminster. Westminster Underground station, on the Circle, District and Jubilee lines, is close by. London City Airport (LCY) is about 13 km away.