Description
Westminster Abbey is London's coronation church, a soaring Gothic abbey beside the Houses of Parliament: since 1066, 40 English and British monarchs have been crowned here, and more than 3,300 people are buried or remembered under its floors and along its walls.
Kings and queens, poets, scientists and prime ministers lie side by side, so close that the writer William Morris called it a "National Valhalla". Here history is not behind glass: it lies underfoot.
The nave is the highest of any Gothic church in England, 31 meters to the vault, and unusually narrow, as in the French cathedrals that inspired it. Purbeck marble columns run toward sixteen Waterford crystal chandeliers, a gift from the Guinness family in 1965.
In front of the high altar lies the Cosmati pavement, a 700-year-old floor of almost 30,000 pieces of colored stone and glass, brought from Rome with Italian craftsmen in the 13th century. Coronations take place on it; its lost inscription predicted the end of the world 19,863 years later.
At the far east end, the Henry VII Chapel is late Gothic at its most dazzling: a ceiling of hanging stone pendants that Washington Irving compared to a cobweb, 95 statues of saints and the knights' banners of the Order of the Bath above the stalls.
Its side chapels hold the tombs of Elizabeth I, who shares her monument with her half-sister Mary I, and of Mary, Queen of Scots, the cousin she had executed: both monuments were ordered by Mary's son, James I.
Poets' Corner, in the south transept, began with Chaucer around 1400 and grew to Dickens, Kipling and Tennyson, with memorials to Shakespeare and Milton. Nearby, Isaac Newton's tomb is surrounded by scientists, Darwin and Stephen Hawking among them.
High in the triforium, reached by a star-shaped tower opened in 2018, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries show the life-size funeral effigies of monarchs, made from the 14th to the 18th century, some still in their original clothes, and the marriage license of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.
It began with a king who wanted a tomb. Around 1050 Edward the Confessor rebuilt a Benedictine abbey on Thorney Island, then an island in the Thames. In 1245 Henry III tore it down for a Gothic shrine worthy of Reims. Edward still lies behind the high altar.
In 1669 the diarist Samuel Pepys saw the body of Catherine of Valois, dead for more than two centuries. He leaned into the coffin and kissed the queen on the mouth.
The Coronation Chair, used since the 14th century, has had a rough life. Westminster schoolboys carved graffiti into it, one boasting he had slept in it all night, and in 1914 a suffragette bomb blew off one of its corners.
Don't miss
• The Cosmati pavement.
• The Henry VII Chapel.
• Poets' Corner.
• The Coronation Chair.
• The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries.
Did you know?
• The grave of the Unknown Warrior, by the west door, was the first of its kind and the only floor stone no one may walk on: royal brides often leave their bouquets on it.
• A door in the vestibule of the chapter house, made from a tree felled in the 11th century, is thought to be the oldest dated door in Britain.
• Every year the Fishmongers' Company gives the abbey a salmon, for a legend about a fisherman who saw St Peter here.
Kings and queens, poets, scientists and prime ministers lie side by side, so close that the writer William Morris called it a "National Valhalla". Here history is not behind glass: it lies underfoot.
The nave is the highest of any Gothic church in England, 31 meters to the vault, and unusually narrow, as in the French cathedrals that inspired it. Purbeck marble columns run toward sixteen Waterford crystal chandeliers, a gift from the Guinness family in 1965.
In front of the high altar lies the Cosmati pavement, a 700-year-old floor of almost 30,000 pieces of colored stone and glass, brought from Rome with Italian craftsmen in the 13th century. Coronations take place on it; its lost inscription predicted the end of the world 19,863 years later.
At the far east end, the Henry VII Chapel is late Gothic at its most dazzling: a ceiling of hanging stone pendants that Washington Irving compared to a cobweb, 95 statues of saints and the knights' banners of the Order of the Bath above the stalls.
Its side chapels hold the tombs of Elizabeth I, who shares her monument with her half-sister Mary I, and of Mary, Queen of Scots, the cousin she had executed: both monuments were ordered by Mary's son, James I.
Poets' Corner, in the south transept, began with Chaucer around 1400 and grew to Dickens, Kipling and Tennyson, with memorials to Shakespeare and Milton. Nearby, Isaac Newton's tomb is surrounded by scientists, Darwin and Stephen Hawking among them.
High in the triforium, reached by a star-shaped tower opened in 2018, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries show the life-size funeral effigies of monarchs, made from the 14th to the 18th century, some still in their original clothes, and the marriage license of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.
It began with a king who wanted a tomb. Around 1050 Edward the Confessor rebuilt a Benedictine abbey on Thorney Island, then an island in the Thames. In 1245 Henry III tore it down for a Gothic shrine worthy of Reims. Edward still lies behind the high altar.
In 1669 the diarist Samuel Pepys saw the body of Catherine of Valois, dead for more than two centuries. He leaned into the coffin and kissed the queen on the mouth.
The Coronation Chair, used since the 14th century, has had a rough life. Westminster schoolboys carved graffiti into it, one boasting he had slept in it all night, and in 1914 a suffragette bomb blew off one of its corners.
Don't miss
• The Cosmati pavement.
• The Henry VII Chapel.
• Poets' Corner.
• The Coronation Chair.
• The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries.
Did you know?
• The grave of the Unknown Warrior, by the west door, was the first of its kind and the only floor stone no one may walk on: royal brides often leave their bouquets on it.
• A door in the vestibule of the chapter house, made from a tree felled in the 11th century, is thought to be the oldest dated door in Britain.
• Every year the Fishmongers' Company gives the abbey a salmon, for a legend about a fisherman who saw St Peter here.