Westminster Abbey

A royal peculiar

The official name is the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster. It is neither a cathedral nor a parish church but a royal peculiar: it falls under no bishop or archbishop, is governed by its own Dean and Chapter, and answers directly to the Sovereign, who is its Visitor. That status is the reason it can hold coronations and state funerals without reference to any diocese.

It reached that position by a complicated route. The Benedictine monastery was dissolved on 16 January 1540. Mary I brought the monks back in 1556, and they were removed again in July 1559. Elizabeth I refounded the place as a collegiate church by charter on 21 May 1560, and that is the constitution it still has.

Three beginnings

Three different foundations have a claim, and conflating them is the commonest error made about the Abbey. A small Benedictine house was founded on the site about 960, under King Edgar and St Dunstan. Edward the Confessor re-endowed it and built a large stone church dedicated to St Peter, consecrated on 28 December 1065; he was too ill to attend and died a week later. And Henry III pulled down the east end of the Confessor's church from 1245 and built the Gothic church that stands now.

So the Confessor founded the great church but not the religious house, and built almost nothing a visitor sees. He is sometimes confused with Edward I, who reigned from 1272 — two centuries apart, and not a conflation worth repeating.

Building the church

Henry III's architect looked to France. The Abbey took its apse with radiating chapels from Reims, Amiens and Chartres, and uses flying buttresses, which were unusual in England; but the plan was adapted to English habit, with single aisles, a long nave, wide projecting transepts and Purbeck marble columns. The vault rises to nearly a hundred and two feet, the highest Gothic vault in England, and the aisles were kept deliberately narrow to make that height tell.

Henry died in 1272 with the east end, transepts and quire finished and only one bay of the nave built beyond the screen. Work resumed in 1376 under the master mason Henry Yevele, who followed the earlier design closely rather than building in the fashion of his own day, which is why the nave reads as a single conception though it took nearly a hundred and fifty years; it was finished in 1517. The west towers were still unfinished stumps three centuries later: they were completed in Portland stone in 1745 to Nicholas Hawksmoor's design, the work finished after his death by John James.

None of the glass is medieval, whatever older accounts say about an original rose window. The north transept rose was glazed in 1722 to a design by Sir James Thornhill, and its tracery was altered when J. L. Pearson largely rebuilt the upper north front between 1879 and 1897. The south transept rose was reglazed in 1902 by Burlison and Grylls. The great west window is of 1735, Thornhill's design made by William Price. The newest window is David Hockney's, revealed in the north transept on 26 September 2018 and made by Barley Studio in York — his first work in stained glass.

The chapel whose roof appears to hang

The Henry VII Lady Chapel at the east end was begun on 24 January 1503 and consecrated on 19 February 1516, and is attributed to Robert Janyns the younger and William Vertue. It is the finest thing in the building and the one genuinely odd piece of engineering.

Its fan vault seems to spring from carved stone pendants hanging in mid-air. It does not: the arches that carry the load run across the chapel concealed above the visible vaulting, with elongated stones dropped from them to form the abutments the pendants appear to rest on. The effect is a ceiling supported by nothing a visitor can see. The form had been tried at the Divinity School in Oxford in the 1480s; the Abbey's chapel is the first to combine it with fan vaulting. Since 1725 the chapel has been the mother church of the Order of the Bath.

Buried, and merely commemorated

The Abbey holds about three thousand three hundred burials and more than six hundred monuments and wall tablets, and the two categories are routinely muddled. Isaac Newton is buried there, in the nave before the choir screen, interred on 28 March 1727, with his monument unveiled in 1731. Chaucer is buried there, in 1400, the first poet to be, though the tomb that marks him dates from 1556. Samuel Johnson is buried in the south transept. Rudyard Kipling's ashes were interred in 1936, and Stephen Hawking's on 15 June 2018, between the graves of Newton and Darwin.

But Winston Churchill is buried at Bladon in Oxfordshire; what the Abbey has is a memorial stone of green verde antico just inside the west door, unveiled on 19 September 1965 and inscribed with the date of the Battle of Britain anniversary four days earlier. James Clerk Maxwell lies at Parton in Kirkcudbrightshire; his nave stone, laid in 1931 beside Newton's grave and replaced in 1976, carries an inscription that translates as "buried elsewhere". Shakespeare is at Stratford.

On Johnson, one correction worth making because it is repeated everywhere: his Dictionary of 1755 was not the first in English. Robert Cawdrey's came out in 1604, and Nathan Bailey's of 1730 held several thousand more words and served Johnson as a working guide. What can be said is that Johnson's was the most influential English dictionary before the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior lies at the west end of the nave. The burial was on 11 November 1920, the grave filled a week later with a hundred sandbags of battlefield earth, and the black Belgian marble slab laid a year after that. It is the only grave in the Abbey on which nobody is permitted to walk. It is often described as the last body buried in the church, with only ashes admitted since; no such rule is published by the Abbey and the claim does not survive checking, though it is true that interments since have overwhelmingly been of cremated remains.

Edward the Confessor's shrine, and what the 2005 survey found

The Confessor lies behind the High Altar, in the shrine in St Edward's Chapel, his coffin in a cavity in the upper part of the Purbeck marble structure. His remains have moved about: buried before the High Altar on 6 January 1066, the tomb opened in 1102, translated in 1163, moved into Henry III's new shrine on 13 October 1269, stripped of relics at the dissolution in 1540, restored to a reassembled shrine under Mary I by 1557, and enclosed in a new iron-clamped coffin by James II in 1685, undisturbed since.

His resting place was therefore never lost, which is worth saying because of what is often made of a survey carried out in 2005. Ground-penetrating radar under the Cosmati pavement and the High Altar steps, with the Abbey's consultant archaeologist, located what is thought to be the site of the Confessor's original 1066 grave — the one he occupied before the translations — along with previously unrecorded chambers, vaults and thirteenth- and fourteenth-century burials. That is a discovery about where he used to be, not about where he is. The Cosmati pavement itself was laid in 1268 by workmen brought from Rome under a craftsman named Odoricus, and was conserved and re-dedicated on 21 May 2010.

The Richard II portrait

The painting of Richard II enthroned in the Coronation Chair, in coronation robes with orb and sceptre, is the earliest known contemporary painted portrait of an English king — a claim worth stating in that exact form, because each of the three qualifications is doing work. It dates from the 1390s, was painted in his lifetime, possibly by the court painter André Beauneveu, on six oak panels. It hangs in the nave, near the west door.

The Chapter House

The octagonal Chapter House, off the cloister, was begun about 1246 and finished around 1255 as part of Henry III's rebuilding. It is sixty feet across inside, with a single central pillar fanning into the vault and tiered seating that held up to eighty monks, and it has one of the best medieval tile pavements in England and a Last Judgement wall painting of about 1390. The King's Great Council met in it in 1257, which has a fair claim to be the beginning of the English Parliament, and the House of Commons sat there for some years in the fourteenth century. It held state records until 1863, and Sir George Gilbert Scott rebuilt its vault and roof between 1866 and 1872. It is in English Heritage guardianship but managed by the Dean and Chapter.

The triforium galleries

The most substantial addition to the Abbey in modern times opened to the public on 11 June 2018. The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries occupy the thirteenth-century triforium, more than fifty feet above the floor of the church, in a space that had never been open to visitors. They hold some three hundred objects, many shown for the first time: the Westminster Retable of 1259 to 1269, the oldest surviving English altarpiece; a cloister capital from the Confessor's church; the funeral effigies, including the head of Henry VII; the Litlyngton Missal and the Liber Regalis; Mary II's coronation chair of 1689; Christopher Wren's scale model of the Abbey; and the marriage licence of 2011. They replaced the Westminster Abbey Museum, which had occupied the eleventh-century undercroft since 1908.

Reaching them required the first major addition to the Abbey church since 1745. The Weston Tower, by the Surveyor of the Fabric, is an external turret of lift and stairs standing in the angle between the Chapter House and the Lady Chapel, outside Poets' Corner.

Coronations, and the modern occasions

Every monarch since William the Conqueror, crowned on Christmas Day 1066, has been crowned in the Abbey — forty of them. The accurate form of that sentence needs two qualifications. Edward V and Edward VIII were never crowned at all, having been deposed and having abdicated. And Henry III was crowned twice: hurriedly at Gloucester on 28 October 1216, aged nine, with a gold circlet of his mother's because the regalia could not be found, and then properly at Westminster on 17 May 1220. He went on to reign fifty-six years, the longest of any medieval English king, and to rebuild the church he had been crowned in.

Three recent events are the ones a reader is most likely to remember and the ones older accounts cannot contain: the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on 29 April 2011; the state funeral of Elizabeth II on 19 September 2022, the first funeral of a monarch held in the Abbey since George II's in 1760; and the coronation of Charles III and Camilla on 6 May 2023, the first British coronation since 1953 and the first of a queen consort since 1937. Pope Benedict XVI attended Evening Prayer on 17 September 2010, the first pope ever to visit.

The new sacristy, and getting there

A building is going up on the north side, on the footprint of Henry III's Great Sacristy of the 1250s, whose foundations were uncovered by excavation in 2020 along with a medieval monastic burial ground. Queen Camilla laid the foundation stone of the King Charles III Sacristy in May 2025. It is to take visitor welcome, security and ticketing out of the north transept, freeing about a tenth of the church's floor area, after which visitors and worshippers will enter by the Great West Door with permanent step-free access. The Abbey has given late 2026 as the completion date and press reports have suggested the visitor centre opens early in 2027, so the position as at late 2026 is that it is not yet in use.

Westminster station, on the Jubilee, District and Circle lines, is about three hundred metres away and is the nearest step-free station. St James's Park, on the District and Circle lines, is about five hundred metres. The name carries two possessives and is often written with neither.