Today is the 200th anniversary of the day when the British Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons. He was shot at 5.15pm at point blank range on 11 May 1812, by John Bellingham, a deranged shipping agent driven mad by his attempts to get the government to […]
Parliamentary History
Parliament and the Portcullis
The use of the Portcullis as a specifically Parliamentary symbol is not a particularly ancient one. In fact it dates from the building of the new Palace of Westminster the 19th century. The genius of Charles Barry’s design for the west front of the Palace (below right) was – among other things – to match it to […]
A Visit to the Tower of London Zoo in 1827
By the early 1830s, many people thought that Parliament should move away from Westminster to the West End. Part of the reason was that John Nash’s development of Regent’s Street had shifted the fashionable focus of the City north-west. One of the trendy delights in the former Marylebone Fields was the new Zoological Gardens at […]
Westminster’s Body Double
Those of you who’ve recently seen The Iron Lady will also have seen a very experienced body double in action. No, not a stand-in for Meryl Streep (congrats on the BAFTA, by the way, Meryl!), but a regular stand-in for the Palace of Westminster: Manchester Town Hall. Alfred Waterhouse’s design at Manchester was, like Barry and Pugin’s in […]
My New Year Reading Resolutions
I had a great haul of books in my Christmas stocking. Here’s a list of what I got from family and friends and will be reading over the next few months. Some of them are for general interest, some work, and some just for fun. First of all, I was given Mark Ormrod’s Edward III, one […]
Remember, Remember, the Old Palace of Westminster
Because of the 1834 fire which burnt it down, many people don’t realise that there was a Houses of Parliament on site at Westminster – the old Palace – before Barry and Pugin designed the current one. Still fewer know what it looked like. That’s led to some startling anachronisms when illustrating historic Parliamentary events, particularly in relation to the […]
