Hastings, Maurice, 1896-1965.

Parliament House, the Chambers of the House of Commons.

London, Architectural Press [1950]

200 pages illustrations, portraits, plans 23 cm

"The new Chamber of the House of Commons has been completed this year. But to understand why it takes the traditional form that it does we have to go back a long way- to the year 1547, in fact, when His majesty's Commons were given St. Stephen Chapel in the Palace of Westminster. In St. Stephen's Chapel )which stood on the site of the present St. Stephen's Hall in the Houses of Parliament) they found a small but magnificent college chapel with a choir, a screen, an altar. Upon the steps of the altar the Speaker placed his chair. The members found seats for themselves in the stalls; and the part of the Chapel beyond the screen became known as the lobby. Out of this purely fortuitous event of 1547 arose the structure of what is undoubtedly the World's most extraordinary institution. Though the Chapel ceased to be a chapel 400 years ago, and even its ruins have long vanished, the Speaker of the Mother of Parliaments still sits on the steps of the 'altar' and Government and Opposition still occupy the Decani (Dean's) side and Cantoris (Precentor's) side. St. Stephen's Chapel, in which so many great Parliamentary events of British history took place up to the Victorian Age, was burnt to the ground in 1834, with the curious result that for those of us who are now professors or M.P.'s, the main events of English history as represented by say, James I, Cromwell, Walpole, Chatham, Fox and Pitt, seen to have taken place in a foggy world the features of which we never seem able to fix. That fog this book clears away at last by a brilliant and learned reconstruction of the background against which these high events and great men moved. It shows you exactly the door Pitt was sick out of, traces Charles I passage to the Commons Chamber when he came to arrest the five members, an re-creates in vivid detail the Chamber form which Cromwell removed the 'Bauble'. It displays learning and scholarship, but far from being dull, the reconstruction of a crime by Holmes or Poriot. Nevertheless, the object is a serious one; to create by means of what Dr. Hastings calls Place-history a more solid, three-dimensional picture of the past than the conventional "event histories' are able to give us; and to show why the new House of Commons, now completed, takes the form that it does -in diret continuation of a tradition fortuitously started in 1547" - Publisher.

Westminster Palace (London, England)
Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons.
Great Britain. Parliament Commons.
Westminster Palace (Londres, Angleterre)
Parliament
House Of Commons
Architecture. Parliament
Parliament. Architecture
Buildings. Parliament

History

Location: Library main 122196
Call No.: W4903; ID:86-B4859
Status: Available