A sense of palace

The creation of the modern Palace of Westminster after the medieval palace’s destruction by fire is a Victorian epic; a three-part novel of Dickensian satire, Trollopian industry and Disraelian hutzpah. It is one whose final success we are unable to match today despite greater wealth and technological resources due to failings of ambition and ability to execute.

First came stupidity beyond satire. It is barely credible that on 16 October 1834, the old palace of Westminster’s guardians should have been so obtuse as to tidy up thousands of the antiquated but historically priceless tally sticks on which the Exchequer’s medieval accounts had been kept by throwing the flammable wooden sticks en masse into furnaces below the House of Lords. But they were.

Secondly, came superhuman effort and industry. The speed with which post-fire reconstruction began is beyond modern Britain’s capabilities. The Houses of Lords and Commons were rehoused within temporary chambers in less than four months; the lead architect (Charles Barry) and the astonishingly ambitious overall plan was chosen in just over a year; and the site’s confident expansion into a newly embanked and narrowed Thames began shortly thereafter. Barry’s assistant, the workaholic genius Augustus Pugin, single-handedly designed and drew pinnacles, ogees, tracery and linen fold panelling by the acre, with a breathtaking rapidity and assurance. The new Lords Chamber was completed in 1847; the new Commons in 1852. The entire Palace, more an urban neighbourhood than a single building, was completed by 1860. A whole ecosystem of contractors, joiners and masons sprang into existence in nearby Lambeth to recreate Parliament and to grow Westminster into the river.

Finally, the triumph. The new Palace of Westminster is the most famous instantly antique building in the world. “Pastiche” doesn’t come close. It was the perfect amalgam of novel construction techniques (iron frames against future fire), sensible Whiggery (sanctifying the practice of daily parliamentary debate) and profound Toryism, with its fabulously ornate celebration of the Crown-in-Parliament. To this day, the Palace’s most opulent portions are the Royal Entrance, the Royal Staircase, the Robing Room, the Royal Gallery and the Prince’s Chamber. The 1835 competition had demanded Elizabethan or Gothic design, rather as Trump now demands classical federal architecture in America. Barry’s chosen pattern, English Perpendicular, mirrored the genius of the Henry VII Chapel a stone’s throw away across Old Palace Yard.

By the time the house of Commons debated its own reconstruction on 28 October 1943 after the chamber’s destruction in the Blitz two years’ earlier, the idea that the new House of Commons should be anything other than the, then deeply unfashionable, Gothic was unthinkable. It was during this debate that Churchill observed that “we shape our Buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The first stone of Giles Gilbert Scott’s recreated gothic House of Commons was laid in May 1948. It opened just over two years later in October 1950.

Besides this history of purpose and beauty, ambition and delivery, the saga of modern Britain’s inability to restore the Palace of Westminster is frankly pathetic. It is the quintessential exemplar of “Broken Britain”, of a state no longer able to conceive sensibly ambitious plans or execute them effectively, of a state so focused on posturing and process that it has forgotten about common sense and outcomes.

The failure is threefold: of conception, of commission and of competence. A brief review of the programme of works reveals clearly that it has grown out of control, idiotically muddling up the genuinely necessary (stripping out asbestos, updating pipes and repairing stone work) with the “nice to have”, the “unnecessary” and the “nearly impossible” (creating visitor centres, trying to make a Victorian building net zero or completely compartmentalising the fire management system as if it was a modern building.) All of these ends are laudable but not for the cost and chaos they create. The Restoration and Renewal programme complains that guards must fire-watch the palace 24 hours a day. This is cheap at the price. Trust me, for a building as complex as the Palace of Westminster with so much flammable wood in it, there will be fire watchers in 30 years’ time as well. And, hewn from stone and wood and Victorian iron, the Palace of Westminster has used far less carbon to create than any modern skyscraper built from energy-gulping steel and glass and concrete. If we were considering its full-life carbon cost over time it would measure up as far “greener” than its leaky heating implies.

If we must create a new visitor centre, let’s knock down the squalid and squat Queen Elizabeth II Centre

Multiple millions have clearly been spent on surveys without cease (photogrammetric, ground investigations, vibration tests and so on and so on). Doubtless many were necessary. But I am confident that many were not. From my own observations on many planning, heritage and development processes there is always a surveyor to tell you that what you need is the survey he’s selling. The Victorians surveyed less and built more. I would not be surprised if the Restoration and Renewal programme has created more pages of bumph than the Palace’s construction in the first place.

We have been going around in loops for years analysing the building to death and generating ridiculously over the top options. At one stage, they were seriously proposing to build a new parliamentary chamber along Whitehall. The project management is out of control. The self-interested, paid-by-the-day consultancy tail is wagging the dog. This does not entirely surprise me. I have never seen so much top-heavy waste as one multi-billion public sector construction programme on whose ineffective advisory board I once sat. Needless to say, they were rapidly behind schedule and above budget. We are so clogged up with risk-aversion, so Byzantine in our over-management that we spend millions on strategies and operating plans and risk assessments going round like a spinning top on the edge of a precipice.

It’s time to get going. Cut the performative posturing and the unnecessary out of the programme. Pass primary legislation. Put a proper CEO or a retired general in charge (as the clever French did at Notre Dame). Set a five or ten-year deadline. Move the Lords into Church House or Methodist Central Hall and the Commons into the Lords (as they did during the war after the Luftwaffe visited) and then swap round when necessary. Continue stripping out unnecessary elements of the programme as we go, repairing only what is essential for safety and longevity. Don’t try to make a nineteenth century building into a twenty-first century one. It will fail. Work to the deadline not the programme and dive for the line. Be finished by 2030 or 2035.

Meanwhile, if we must create a new visitor centre, don’t try to squeeze it into a Victorian parliament but knock down the excrescence which is the squalid and squat five storey Queen Elizabeth II Centre on the other side of Parliament Square. Replace it with a sumptuous 15 storey modern gothic tower mingling the world’s best visitor centre with luxuriant conference space, offices and flats. All the other gothic towers in Westminster are eighteenth or nineteenth century. Why not create one more even bigger and more marvellous and use the profit to pay for the restoration? This is the right type of ambition.

The British state is staffed by kind, good and hard-working people. They are not the job-shy shirkers of social media myth. Though they are, as we now see these matters, mostly “woke” in their subservience to identity politics, and inefficient in their copy-everyone-so-you-cannot-be-criticised culture, they do not hold these positions from revolutionary zeal or indolence but from consensual good manners. It’s what everyone else does. It’s how you get promoted. If the wind changes direction, ultimately so will they.

Give those who manage the Palace of Westminster, and the contractors who work to them, a deadline and a sense of purpose. Theirs is the duty to care for one of the world’s greatest buildings, one of the handful of instantly recognisable structures around the world which symbolises not just London and Britain but the rich tension between democracy and monarchy, liberalism and tradition which, once upon a time, was the British genius. What an opportunity to help it sail on into the far future. What a moment to seize, to be the heir to Gladstone and Disraeli, Barry and Pugin. It’s not just a project to be project managed. It is a duty willingly to embrace.