Westminster Abbey

A monastery dedicated to Saint Peter stood on the site before the 11th century; its beginnings are generally dated to about 959, when Dunstan and King Edgar installed Benedictine monks on Thorney Island in the Thames. Between 1042 and 1052 Edward the Confessor began rebuilding the abbey as his own burial church, in the Romanesque style and on the first cruciform plan in England.

The church was consecrated on 28 December 1065, about a week before Edward died on 5 January 1066; he was buried in it a week later. Harold Godwinson was probably crowned there, though the first documented coronation is William the Conqueror's later that year. In 1103 Abbot Gilbert Crispin and Henry I re-opened Edward's tomb and found the body still in perfect condition, taken as proof of his saintliness; he was canonised in 1161.

Henry III set out to rebuild the church in the Gothic style as a shrine to venerate Edward, modelled on great French churches such as Reims Cathedral. Construction began on 6 July 1245 under his master mason Henry of Reynes. For the Confessor's golden shrine, 4,000 marks came from the estate of David of Oxford and £2,500 from a forced contribution exacted from his widow Licoricia of Winchester, by far the biggest single donation of the time.

From 1257 Henry held assemblies in the chapter house, a precursor of the House of Commons, and by 1261 he had spent over £29,000 on the abbey. At the consecration on 13 October 1269 the remains of Edward the Confessor were moved to the shrine behind the main altar. Work stopped about 1269 and did not resume after Henry's burial there in 1272, leaving the Confessor's Romanesque nave attached to the new church for over a century.

From 1376 Abbot Nicholas Litlyngton and Richard II funded the completion of the church, Richard's mason Henry Yevele following the original design. The nave reached the west window in 1495, and from 1503 Henry VII had the 13th-century Lady chapel rebuilt in Perpendicular Gothic, its structure complete by 1509.

Under Henry VIII the golden feretory holding the Confessor's coffin was melted down and the monks hid his bones; the monastery was dissolved and the church became the cathedral of the new Diocese of Westminster. Benedictines returned under Mary I and were ejected under Elizabeth I in 1559, and by a charter of 21 May 1560 Elizabeth made the building the Collegiate Church of St Peter, a royal peculiar answerable directly to the sovereign. She also re-founded Westminster School for forty King's Scholars.

The Dean and Chapter fled at the outbreak of civil war in 1642, and the organ, altars and stained glass were damaged. Oliver Cromwell was given an elaborate funeral there in 1658, and in January 1661 his body was disinterred and hanged from a gibbet at Tyburn. Christopher Wren became the abbey's first Surveyor of the Fabric, and the west towers were built in the 1740s by Nicholas Hawksmoor and John James. George II, buried in 1760, was the last monarch interred in the abbey.

On 11 June 1914 a bomb planted by suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union exploded inside the abbey, blowing off a corner of the Coronation Chair and breaking the Stone of Scone in half, a crack not discovered until 1950. On the night of 10–11 May 1941 incendiary bombs struck the precincts and roof, and the lantern tower collapsed, leaving the abbey open to the sky. No one was killed, and services continued throughout the war.

Forty English and British monarchs have been crowned in the abbey since William the Conqueror in 1066, most recently Charles III on 6 May 2023. More than 3,300 people are buried or commemorated there, among them an estimated eighteen monarchs, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and the writers of Poets' Corner, where Geoffrey Chaucer was buried about 1400.

The grave of the Unknown Warrior, an unidentified soldier killed on a European battlefield in the First World War, was suggested by the army chaplain David Railton in 1920; an estimated 1.25 million people viewed it in the week after the funeral of 11 November 1920. The state funeral of Elizabeth II on 19 September 2022 was the first funeral of a monarch at the abbey in more than 260 years.

The abbey is governed by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster; it was listed Grade I in 1958 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 with the Palace of Westminster and St Margaret's Church. Charging at the door began in 1997, when about 1.75 million people were visiting each year.