Parliament has been deciding for a decade whether to move out of its own building while it is repaired. In February 2026 the choice was narrowed to two: leave entirely, costed at £11.1 to £15.6 billion over nineteen to twenty-four years, or stay and work around the builders, at £19.5 to £39.2 billion over thirty-eight to sixty-one years. One of them is to be chosen no later than the middle of 2030. Which it is matters to anyone hoping to see inside, because under the first there would be no regular public access to the Palace at all.
The fire of 1834, and what survived it
The building that burned was a medieval royal palace adapted over centuries, and it burned because of an administrative tidy-up. The Exchequer had two cart-loads of obsolete wooden tally sticks to dispose of, and the Clerk of Works had them burned in the underfloor stoves in the basement of the House of Lords. Visitors noticed heat and smoke through the day of 16 October 1834; the furnaces were out by five in the afternoon; fire was discovered at about six. It became the largest conflagration in London between the Great Fire and the Blitz, and both Turner and Constable watched it.
It was not unforeseen. John Soane had warned in 1828 that much of the Palace was timber under plaster.
Both Chambers and most of the other buildings went. Four things did not. Westminster Hall was saved by firefighting and by a wind that shifted overnight. The Jewel Tower survived because the wind blew away from it, which is why the Lords' historic records, stored there, survived too. The Chapel of St Mary Undercroft came through because it is underground, though its stonework was badly damaged and was heavily restored in neo-Gothic between 1860 and 1870. And the St Stephen's Cloister and Chapter House, of 1526 to 1529, survived — only to be bomb-damaged a century later and considerably restored.
The competition, and who designed what
A Royal Commission was appointed in 1835 and the competition drew ninety-seven anonymous entries. The commissioners preferred entry sixty-four, marked with a portcullis, unanimously. It was Charles Barry's. Neoclassical designs had been ruled out in advance, the commission associating them with republicanism, which is the reason the seat of British government is Gothic rather than columned.
The style is Perpendicular Gothic — the last and most English phase of medieval Gothic, revived. Parliament's own pages describe one of its designs as Tudor in style, which is wrong and worth ignoring.
The foundation stone was laid by Barry's wife on 27 April 1840. The Lords first sat in their purpose-built chamber in 1847 and the Commons in 1852, the year Barry was knighted and Victoria opened the New Palace. On when the thing was finished there is no single answer, and the two dates in circulation refer to different events: most of the building was complete by 1860, which was also the year the Victoria Tower was topped out and Barry died, and the works were wound up about a decade later, under his son E. M. Barry. Historic England's list entry, for its part, dates the New Palace 1835 to 1860.
The division of credit between Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin is misattributed in both directions, and not only by popular accounts — Parliament's own pages disagree with each other about it. The defensible position is this. Pugin was paid four hundred pounds to help with Barry's competition drawings. Barry led the overall design, the plan and the massing. Pugin designed most of the Gothic interiors, down to the doorknobs and the spill trays, and added the heraldic decoration including the portcullis that became the badge of both Houses. Who should have the credit for the clock tower specifically is disputed in the official record, so it is best left disputed. Pugin died in 1852 at forty, shortly after a stay in Bedlam, having written of the tower's final designs that he never worked so hard in his life.
Westminster Hall
The Hall was built for William II between 1097 and 1099 and is the oldest part of the Palace by four centuries. It is about 73 metres by 20, with walls two metres thick and a central span of eighteen metres or more.
The hammerbeam roof is the reason to look up. It was made for Richard II by the master carpenter Hugh Herland, commissioned in 1393 and finished by 1401, with the associated masonry — including buttresses to strengthen the walls — by the King's chief mason Henry Yevele. One claim about it should be handled carefully: that it is the largest medieval timber roof of its kind in northern Europe is Parliament's own assertion, repeated on its own pages and corroborated nowhere independent. Historic England, describing the same roof in the statutory list entry, says only that it is of exceptionally early date and scale. The narrower claim — the largest clear-span medieval roof in England — is the defensible one.
The Royal Courts of Justice sat in the Hall until they moved to the Strand in 1882, which is what the great state trials were doing here. William Wallace was tried in 1305, his defence being that he had never sworn allegiance to Edward I. Sir Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher were both tried in 1535, Protector Somerset in 1551, Edmund Campion and other Jesuits in 1581, and the Gunpowder Plot conspirators after 1605. Charles I was sentenced to death here on 27 January 1649. Richard III sat in King's Bench in the Hall in 1483, the last time a reigning king dispensed justice in it.
What it is used for now is lyings-in-state, ceremonial addresses and occasional public exhibitions. Gladstone's lying-in-state in 1898 was the first; the others have included Edward VII, the victims of the airship R101 in 1930, George V, George VI, Queen Mary, Churchill in 1965, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 2002, and Elizabeth II from 14 to 19 September 2022.
Addresses to both Houses are worth getting the right way round, because the usual assumption is backwards. Most visiting heads of state speak in the Royal Gallery, not in Westminster Hall: across the reigns of Elizabeth II and Charles III there were twenty-eight addresses in the Royal Gallery and eleven in Westminster Hall. The Hall is the rare honour, and the eleven include de Gaulle in 1960, Mandela in 1996, Obama in 2011 and Zelenskyy in 2023.
The bell, the clock, and what Big Ben actually is
Big Ben is the bell — strictly the Great Bell, which sounds the hour. It is not the tower and not the clock, and Parliament says so explicitly. The tower was the Clock Tower until 2012, when it was renamed the Elizabeth Tower for the Diamond Jubilee: the House of Commons Commission agreed it on 25 June that year and the Speaker unveiled the plaque on 12 September.
There were two bells. The first was cast in 1856 at Stockton-on-Tees, at John Warner and Sons' new Norton foundry rather than their London works, which were too small for it; it came south by rail and sea, and cracked during testing in New Palace Yard and was broken up. The second was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in April 1858 and hauled up a shaft inside the tower sideways, being too big to go through the entrance. The clock started on 31 May 1859, the bell first struck on 11 July 1859, and it cracked later the same year.
The repair, in 1863, was proposed by the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy: the bell was turned so a different part faced the hammer, a lighter hammer was fitted, and a small square was cut out of the bell to stop the crack spreading. The crack is still there, and it is part of why the note sounds as it does. How far the bell was turned is given variously as a quarter and an eighth of a turn, including by Parliament itself, so the figure is best omitted. Blame for the crack is likewise unsettled: the clockmaker blamed the founders for casting the waist thicker than specified, while others blamed his own choice of alloy and his insistence on a heavy hammer.
The clock was designed by Edmund Beckett Denison, later Lord Grimthorpe, his design approved in February 1852, and built by Edward John Dent over two years for £2,500. Airy had refereed the earlier competition and set the specification. The gravity escapement that keeps it going was devised for this clock. It is adjusted by adding or removing old pennies from the pendulum, and the true figure is smaller than the one usually quoted: one penny makes the clock gain two-fifths of a second in twenty-four hours, not a whole second.
The description of it as the most accurate clock in the world was a Victorian ambition rather than a present-day fact, and Airy's one-second specification is a requirement that gets quoted as a performance. Cambridge engineers have described the wear that accumulates on the escapement's hardened steel seats over millions of impacts, and the creep in the pendulum's zinc tube that degrades its temperature compensation. The clock also broke down completely on 5 August 1976 and was silent for nearly nine months, repairs finishing in time for the Silver Jubilee visit to Westminster Hall in May 1977. It was silenced again for maintenance in 2007.
There was a clock tower here long before this one. A chiming clock, said to have been the first in England, was installed in 1367; the medieval tower was demolished in 1698 and replaced with a sundial, and its bell went to St Paul's Cathedral, broke on the way, was recast in 1716, and hangs there still — able to sound the hours in place of Big Ben if it has to.
The Elizabeth Tower, and why the dials are blue again
The tower stands over 96 metres and is twelve metres square. Each of the four dials is about seven metres across, its centre fifty-five metres above the ground, glazed with 312 pieces of opal glass. The Great Bell is 2.7 metres across and weighs about 13.7 tonnes, with four quarter bells of one to four tonnes and a hammer of two hundred kilograms. The hour hands are gun metal, 2.7 metres long; the minute hands are copper sheet, 4.2 metres long, and travel something like 190 kilometres a year. It is 334 steps to the belfry and fifty-nine more to the lantern at the top.
That lantern is the Ayrton Light, named after Acton Smee Ayrton, First Commissioner of Works from 1869 to 1873, who proposed a signal light near the top of the tower. It is lit whenever either House is sitting after dark, which makes it the most useful thing on the building to a passer-by. It began as gas, because commercial electricity did not yet exist, was converted to electricity in 1903 and is being changed to light-emitting diodes. Its date is a trap: Parliament gives 1885 on one of its own factsheets and 1892 on two other pages, and other accounts say 1873. The 1892 account is the best evidenced, naming both the installer and the type of lamp, but anyone copying the factsheet copies the error. The story that Queen Victoria asked for the light so that she could see from Buckingham Palace whether either House was sitting is tradition rather than established fact, and Parliament hedges it accordingly.
The conservation of 2017 to 2022 was the largest work ever done on the tower. It went from the gilt cross and orb at the top to the bottom of the staircase: cast-iron roofs stripped back to their main rafters and every element inspected, the clock mechanism removed and refurbished off site, the dials restored and reglazed, weathered stone replaced, a new lift installed and the life-safety systems rebuilt. Only once the scaffolding was up could intrusive surveys be done, and they found unsuspected Second World War bomb damage, asbestos in the belfry, extensive toxic lead paint, defective earlier repairs, hundreds of decayed carvings and around seven hundred stone repairs, nearly double the estimate.
The cost rose accordingly: an original budget of £29 million, then £61.1 million in 2017, then £79.7 million approved in February 2020, then up to nine million more for the effects of the pandemic, taking the projection to close to £89 million by April 2021. The figure of eighty million, which circulates as the final cost, is the February 2020 budget and not an outturn. No audited final cost has been published. The architect was Purcell and the contractor Sir Robert McAlpine, and the work was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2025.
The visible result is the colour. Paint analysis by specialists at the University of Lincoln, working across more than a century and a half of layers, identified six successive colour schemes, and cross-checked them against original drawings in the Parliamentary Archives, Barry's own watercolour design, contemporary illustrations and archival photographs. The dial frames and hands went back to Barry's 1859 scheme of Prussian blue and gold, with red, white and blue in the surrounding decoration, the six shields above each dial restored to St George's red cross on white, and gilding reinstated where photographs showed it had been. The black everyone remembers was not original at all: it dates from about the 1930s and was probably applied to disguise pollution damage.
The night of 10 May 1941
On the last night of the Blitz the Commons Chamber was completely destroyed by fire and its ceiling collapsed. Westminster Hall's roof was set alight the same night and the Hall was saved. A small bomb broke the glass in the south dial of the Clock Tower, but the clock and the bells were undamaged and kept going. The dial lights and the Ayrton Light had been dark since 1939 and were not lit again until April 1945.
The Commons met in the Lords and used St Stephen's Hall on the first day of each session from 1945 to 1950 while the Chamber was rebuilt. The new Chamber was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott — the same architect who built Bankside power station, now Tate Modern, and Liverpool's Anglican cathedral — and was opened by George VI on 26 October 1950.
The other towers and halls
Victoria Tower, at 98.5 metres, is the tallest tower of the Palace, its first stone laid on 22 December 1843 and the work completed around 1860 when the flagstaff went up. It was designed as both a royal entrance and a store for Parliament's historic records, and it now holds the Parliamentary Archives, records having moved in from 1860. The flagstaff flies the Royal Standard when the Sovereign is in the Palace and the Union flag otherwise, which is a quicker way of telling than any announcement. The Sovereign's Entrance is at its base.
St Stephen's Hall stands on the site of the royal Chapel of St Stephen, where the Commons met until the fire, and matches the chapel's footprint at twenty-nine metres by nine. Brass studs set in the floor mark where the Speaker's Chair and the Table of the House stood, and two brass tablets on the far wall mark the screen that divided the lobby from the Chamber. Statues of Hampden, Walpole, Pitt and Fox face each other down its length. A suffragette chained herself to one of them in 1909, and Historic England records the Hall as the site of many such protests.
The Central Lobby is the hub of the building: octagonal, stone, with a mosaic vault and the Central Tower rising above it. Barry meant it as a place where members of both Houses could meet each other and where Members could meet constituents, and that second function is still live — a member of the public can go to the Central Lobby and ask to lobby their MP without an appointment, though booking ahead is sensible. Four large mosaics over the exits show the patron saints, St George installed in 1870 and St David in 1898, the full set unfinished until the early 1920s after a long argument about cost.
The Jewel Tower, across the road to the south, is the odd one out and is routinely mistaken for part of the Palace tour. It is neither. Built in 1365 and 1366 within Edward III's Privy Palace, on land taken from Westminster Abbey, it was directed by Henry Yevele and Hugh Herland — the same pair as the Westminster Hall roof — and finished within a year. It held royal valuables, then the Lords' records from about 1600 until they moved to the Victoria Tower in 1864, then the Board of Trade's weights and measures testing from 1869 to 1938. It was damaged by incendiary bombs in 1941 and taken into state care as a monument in 1948. It is a Scheduled Monument and separately Grade I listed, the only surviving building of the medieval Privy Palace, and is presented by English Heritage as a visitor site in its own right.
Restoration and renewal: the decision that keeps not being taken
The Palace needs work on a scale that cannot be done around the people using it, and the argument about how has been running for more than a decade. The Client Board published costed proposals on 5 February 2026, reducing four long-term options to two and committing to develop both in parallel, with a single option to be chosen no later than the middle of 2030.
The two are full decant — everyone out — at £11.1 to £15.6 billion over nineteen to twenty-four years, and enhanced maintenance and improvement, which keeps Parliament on site, at £19.5 to £39.2 billion over thirty-eight to sixty-one years, finishing around 2086. The counter-intuitive part, which accounts of this routinely get backwards, is that staying is far more expensive and far slower than leaving, as well as carrying higher fire, health, safety and security risk and worse accessibility. A distinct continued-presence option was assessed and not shortlisted, so that term should not be used for the alternative.
What was not endorsed is full decant, despite the Board's own analysis finding it cheapest, quickest and safest — and despite its having been found best in 2015, 2016, 2021 and 2022 and endorsed by Parliament itself in 2018. That decision has effectively been reopened and not retaken.
Ahead of either, a first phase capped at £3 billion over up to seven years covers temporary chambers and offices, preparation for restoring the medieval Cloister Court, the interior of the Victoria Tower, the start of underground construction, and a river jetty for construction deliveries. Whether either House has approved that phase could not be established: as of June 2026 the National Audit Office described Parliament's approval as being sought rather than given, and no debate or division on it is on record. The Audit Office put the programme at a critical stage and the cost of delay at £320 to £420 million for every year the decision is postponed, and identified temporary accommodation as the largest risk.
For anyone wanting to get inside, the difference between the two options is stark. Under full decant there would be no regular public access to the Palace, beyond Elizabeth Tower tours and whatever parts reopened in stages. Under the alternative, public access is kept throughout, on changed routes and with reduced weekend and recess access, and Westminster Hall would serve as a secondary Chamber.
Visiting
Two distinct routes exist and are easy to confuse. Paid tours are open to anyone, with no residency requirement: a ninety-minute guided tour in English, a self-guided audio tour in ten languages, and a tour of Speaker's House on selected dates in the Easter and summer holidays. The route takes in Westminster Hall, the Central Lobby and both Chambers, and does not include Big Ben. Tours run on Saturdays through the year and from Monday to Saturday during recess. There is also a free guided tour restricted to UK residents, booked through a Member of the Commons or of the Lords.
Watching a debate from the public galleries is free and open to residents and overseas visitors alike. No ticket is needed for general debates, though there may be a queue; Prime Minister's Questions requires one.
The Elizabeth Tower tour is running and is open to everyone aged eleven or over, international visitors included — the residency restriction applies only to the separate free tickets allocated through Members. It is 334 steps up a narrow stone spiral, to be done up and down inside ninety minutes with managed pauses. It is not step-free, walking aids are not permitted, and assistance dogs cannot currently go up; an accessible tour exists on request but uses no lift. Ear defenders are provided. Tickets are released on the second Wednesday of each month at ten in the morning and go quickly.
One practical warning. Parliament's own pages for the free tours and for attending debates are roughly two years out of date, still listing cancellations from 2024 and treating a past State Opening as forthcoming. Its ticketing site is current; those pages are not.
World Heritage, and the figures to distrust
The site was inscribed in 1987, with its boundary modified in 2008, under the name Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey including Saint Margaret's Church — three components, under three criteria, one of which is that the three buildings together illustrate nearly nine centuries of parliamentary monarchy, and another that the Abbey influenced the Palace's design during the Gothic Revival. The Palace is separately Grade I listed, first listed on 5 February 1970.
Two kinds of figure about this building should be treated with suspicion. The first is the counts: roughly 1,100 rooms, around a hundred staircases and some 4.8 kilometres of passageways are Parliament's own approximations rather than a survey, and the floor area is published in two forms, about eight acres and about twenty-eight, which are almost certainly footprint against internal area over four floors — no source says which, so neither should be quoted alone.
The second is the superlatives, and there are a great many: the largest Gothic Revival building in the world, the Victoria Tower as the tallest secular building or the largest square stone tower anywhere, Westminster Hall as the largest hall in Europe when built, Big Ben as the biggest bell in Britain. None of these is corroborated by Historic England, UNESCO or independent scholarship, and the bell is on most counts the third heaviest in the country. Several of them originate with the building's own custodians, which is what makes them look authoritative.
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