In praise of Westminster Hall

In 2020 I did a presentation to some secondary school students for which I needed to do some research into one of my favourite buildings, the extraordinary Westminster Hall. I then did a twitter thread highlighting some of its fascinating history. Here is a transposition of that thread, so it reaches a wider audience, and so it’s not lost forever if twitter disappears.

Westminster Hall has long been one of my favourite buildings - I used to love walking through it or going to have a look round when doing work in Parliament. But I hadn’t realised quite how extraordinary it is, both the building and the range of things it was used for.

The Hall was built in 1097-9 by William II, the son of William the Conqueror. Its walls are two metres thick, but it’s the roof that is perhaps its most striking feature. There are two mysteries about the roof: first, what the original roof was like. It is thought that 11th century carpenters couldn’t create roofs significantly wider than the timber they were using, so it would need to be supported. But no evidence has been found of any columns. 🤔

The current roof was built at the end of the 14th century by Richard II, who also made additions to the Hall, including adding statues of kings (naturally including himself). Hammer-beams stick out from the walls, on which wooden arches rest. The timbers weigh 660 tons. The wood came from the south of England. In the early twentieth century, when some beams needed replacing, the owner of the estate it had come from, George Courthorpe, happened to be an MP. The oak then used for the replacement beams was 600 years old, so had been growing when the roof was first built.

The second mystery is that no-one knows how the roof does not collapse under its own weight: in particular whether the hammer beams or the gothic arch hold it up, and which trusses are structural and which mainly decorative. This 1999 article in Architectural History magazine starts with the astonishing statement that:

‘Many attempts have been made to determine how the Westminster Hall roof works, and nearly as many different conclusions have been reached’.

The roof was covered with lead (weighing another 170 tons) until the eighteenth century, when the lead was sold to cover the costs of crucial repairs, and replaced with slate, which remains to this day.

The range of uses of the Hall is as remarkable as the building. From medieval times it was at the centre of Government, and was used (among other things) for administration, banquets and ceremonies, for dispensing justice, lyings-in-state, as a drill hall for volunteer soldiers, and as a shopping centre.

In its early days, the Hall was mainly used by monarchs. The King’s High Table, at the south end of the hall, was an important symbol of power, from which the monarch dispensed justice.

The Exchequer, which accounted for the king’s money, was housed in a building adjoining the Hall until the 19th century. (The Government used to count its money - a confrontational audit process between powerful Barons and accountants - using counters on a large chequered cloth: hence, Exchequer.)

The Hall was used for many great banquets, including coronation banquets celebrating Monarchs being crowned in the nearby Abbey. Around 3,000 people attended Richard III’s coronation banquet in 1483. William IV abandoned these banquets because of their cost. (This picture of the Hall from the 1680s incidentally reminds us that Westminster Abbey’s famous towers were an 18th century addition.)

For almost seven centuries, from the 12th until the 19th centuries, the Hall was at the centre of the English legal system. Initially the King himself would hear cases, sitting at the High Table - Richard III was the last to do this. The courts increasingly developed independently of the king, taking over the King’s High Table, but the main courts (the King’s Bench, the Court of Pleas and Chancery) sat in the Hall, or nearby, until the 19th century. The accommodation used by the courts was fairly simple, as it had to be able to be dismantled easily when the Hall was used for feasts. The courts moved out completely in the 1820s, eventually moving to the Strand.

One of the state trials in Westminster Hall was that of Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators who tried to blow up the House of Lords when King James I was there for the State Opening in 1605. As we commemorate every November, the gunpowder hidden in an undercroft was discovered before it could be set off. The conspirators were tried in January 1606, just two months after the Gunpowder Plot was discovered. Their trial lasted just a day, and they were executed a few days later.

Perhaps the most famous Westminster Hall trial was that of Charles I in 1649 following the Civil War. The idea of a King being tried was unthinkable, and Charles refused to accept the court’s authority, but was nevertheless found guilty. He was publicly executed a few days later outside the Banqueting House in nearby Whitehall Palace.

Oliver Cromwell, the Civil War victor, resisted pressure to become king, and was instead declared Lord Protector at a ceremony in the Hall in 1653. He was reinstalled there four years later, in a ceremony that bore some remarkable similarities to a King’s Coronation.

After the Restoration, a new passageway into the hall was created for Charles II’s coronation. It was recently rediscovered, along with graffiti dating from the mid 19th century when it was being bricked up.

Merchants were selling their wares in Westminster Hall by the late C13th, meeting the needs of the lawyers using the hall, and also books and clothes. By Samuel Pepys’ time there were 48 shops in the hall, but they were mostly gone by the late C18th.

“I over to Southwarke, and took boat on the other side the bridge, and so to Westminster, thinking to shift myself, being all in dirt from top to bottom; but could not there find any place to buy a shirt or pair of gloves, Westminster Hall being full of people’s goods.” (The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 6 September 1666, during the Great Fire of London.)

Twice in the last two hundred years, Westminster Hall, and particularly its roof, have come close to being destroyed. I can hardly bear the thought.

The first time it was the Exchequer’s fault: they used wooden tally sticks to count money, and in 1834 someone decided it would be a good idea to burn two cartloads of sticks in the heating furnaces beneath the House of Lords. Westminster Hall was one of the few parts of the old Palace that survived the resulting inferno. But it was only saved through the efforts of firefighters, using a floating fire engine on the Thames, and hundreds of volunteers, who doused the roof timbers with water. (JMW Turner famously painted the scene.)

The Hall was nearly destroyed again during World War II: when the Palace was bombed in May 1941, the fire service had to choose between saving Westminster Hall, whose roof was on fire, and the House of Commons. They chose the Hall; the Commons chamber was destroyed and had to be completely rebuilt.

One of the joys of walking around the Hall is spotting tablets marking where key events took place. Charles I stood here during his trial. (Officially, 25 March was New Year’s Day in England until 1753, so January 1649 was still technically 1648. If you look carefully, to avoid confusion(?) the tablet says “1648-9”.)

We can also find where Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa, stood when he addressed both Houses of Parliament in 1996.

There are also tablets where, for example, Winston Churchill (1965) and the Queen Mother (2002) lay in state - their coffins displayed for people to pay their respects before they were buried. I haven’t been to the Hall recently to see whether there is yet a tablet showing where the late Queen Elizabeth II lay in state last year, but if not I'm sure there will be one day.

February 2025 update - there is:

If you get the opportunity, do go and spend some time in Westminster Hall - don’t just use it as a corridor into the rest of the Palace: pause there for a while, look above your head and beneath your feet, and breath in the history seeping from every stone of those ancient walls and the oaks of that imposing, remarkable roof.