Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey is where England’s monarchs are crowned and many are buried. Henry III rebuilt it from 1245 in the French Gothic style, unusually tall for England. Henry VII’s Chapel has one of the most astonishing vaults of the late Middle Ages.
Edward the Confessor built a large Romanesque abbey church on the site, consecrated in 1065. Henry III had it pulled down and from 1245 began building a new church in the French Gothic he admired, with Reims and the Sainte-Chapelle as models. The master builder was Henry de Reyns. The king also wanted to honour Edward the Confessor, who had become a saint, with a magnificent shrine. The choir and the eastern part of the nave were finished when the king died in 1272. The rest of the nave was built in the 14th and 15th centuries in the same style, so the church looks unusually unified.
The church has a French plan with a ring of chapels around the choir and a nave about 31 metres high. To the east lies Henry VII’s Chapel, built in 1503–1519, with a fan vault in which hanging stone pendants seem to float. The west towers were added in 1722–1745 to designs by Nicholas Hawksmoor, who made them blend with the medieval church. The pavement in front of the high altar is Cosmati work from 1268, with patterns of stone and glass from Italy. The church is filled with tombs and memorials, among them in Poets’ Corner, where Geoffrey Chaucer is buried.
The monastery was dissolved in 1540, but the church was kept and became a so-called Royal Peculiar, directly subject to the monarch. Every coronation since William the Conqueror’s in 1066 has taken place here, most recently that of Charles III in 2023, and here stands the Coronation Chair that Edward I had made. About three thousand people are buried or commemorated here, among them Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. The church became a World Heritage Site in 1987 together with the Palace of Westminster. It shows how French Gothic acquired its own English form.