Palace of Westminster

Between about 1045 and 1050 Edward the Confessor built a palace here and the first Westminster Abbey. The oldest surviving building is Westminster Hall, erected in 1097 for William II and at that point the largest hall in Europe; it was remade for Richard II from 1393, when the royal carpenter Hugh Herland raised its hammerbeam roof, the largest clearspan medieval roof in England.

The Model Parliament, reckoned the first Parliament of England, sat at the palace in 1295, and though medieval parliaments met in many places, the palace became their permanent home. A fire destroyed the royal apartments in 1512, and in 1534 Henry VIII moved to the neighbouring Palace of Whitehall, which he had seized from Cardinal Wolsey; Westminster remained a royal palace, but its principal occupants were now the two Houses and the courts of law.

In 1605 Roman Catholic gentry, seeking to restore Catholicism by killing the Protestant James I, placed gunpowder beneath the House of Lords for Guy Fawkes to detonate at the State Opening on 5 November. The plot was discovered; the surviving plotters were tried for high treason in Westminster Hall and executed by hanging, drawing and quartering, and the Yeomen of the Guard have searched the cellars before every State Opening since. Sir Walter Raleigh was executed at the palace on 29 October 1618. In 1642 Charles I entered the chamber to arrest five members for high treason; Speaker William Lenthall answered that he had "neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me", and by tradition no monarch has entered the Commons chamber since. On 11 May 1812 Spencer Perceval was shot dead in the Commons lobby by the merchant John Bellingham, and remains the only British prime minister to have been assassinated.

On 16 October 1834 an overheated stove burning the Exchequer's stockpile of tally sticks set fire to the Lords Chamber. Both Houses burned along with most of the complex; Westminster Hall was saved by firefighting and a change in the wind.

Charles Barry's Perpendicular Gothic Revival design was chosen; a classical architect, he relied heavily on Augustus Pugin for the Gothic detail, and Pugin, displeased with the symmetry of the layout, remarked, "All Grecian, sir; Tudor details on a classic body". The Lords Chamber was finished in 1847 and the Commons in 1852. Barry conceived the Victoria Tower as the keep of a legislative castle; at its completion in 1858 it was the tallest secular building in the world. Most of the work was done by 1860, though the palace was finished only a decade later.

Fenian bombs struck the new palace on 24 January 1885: a bag of dynamite found by the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft grew so hot that PC William Cole dropped it, and the blast seriously injured him and a colleague; a second charge went off in the empty Commons Chamber. Westminster Hall was closed to visitors for several years.

The palace was hit by bombs on fourteen occasions in the Second World War. In the raid of 10-11 May 1941 it took at least twelve hits and three people were killed: two policemen and Edward Elliott, Resident Superintendent of the House of Lords. The Commons Chamber and the roof of Westminster Hall both caught fire, and as the firefighters could not save both, the hall was prioritised and the chamber destroyed. Giles Gilbert Scott rebuilt the chamber in a simplified style, and George VI opened it on 26 October 1950.

The palace was designated a Grade I listed building in 1970 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with Westminster Abbey and St Margaret's, in 1987. On 17 June 1974 a Provisional IRA bomb of 9 kg exploded in Westminster Hall; the blast and a fire fed by a ruptured gas main injured eleven people. On 30 March 1979 a car bomb killed the Conservative politician Airey Neave as he drove out of the Commons car park; the Irish National Liberation Army is now accepted as responsible. In 2022 Elizabeth II lay in state in Westminster Hall.

There is no casual access to the interior: UK residents may obtain a gallery place, or a free guided tour during the session, through an MP or a peer; anyone may queue while a House is sitting, and paid tours run in the summer recess and on Saturdays. The Commons voted in January 2018 for both Houses to leave for a refurbishment expected to take at least six years and to begin no sooner than 2025, and a Restoration and Renewal Client Board was formed in September 2022. As of February 2026 no plan had been agreed.