Photo: londondrum.comEveryone who comes to London should visit Westminster Abbey… simple as that. It’s the British equivalent of the Valley of the Kings. It’s also the second best building in the capital after Parliament, and contains the single greatest room in the Henry VII chapel.
It’s unlike any church that I’ve ever been to with memorials and statues piled up so tight on top of each other that you walk past ten tombs every two paces. You definitely need to listen to the audio-guide or you’ll miss out a lot of interesting material, and I also recommend getting hold of a map because the audio-guide inexplicably misses out a lot of good ones. When you walk in the front door you’ll pass people like Darwin and Elgar, for example, but neither warrants a mention on the tape. And how can you forget someone like Darwin? (Maybe the church still hasn’t forgiven him. They sure do hold their grudges a long time!)
Before you reach the kings and queens you have to stroll through a few corridors of 20th-century politicians like Lloyd George, Attlee, Baldwin, MacDonald and Wilson. Churchill gets a plum spot by the door, but you can definitely see who had the biggest egos: Charles Fox and Henry Campbell-Bannerman – their tombs are bigger than all the other ones put together.
Altar and the Cosmati pavement
The statues round the side are all good enough for an exhibition in the National Gallery. Some of them span two floors in height and stand ten-feet tall – and these are for people that nobody knows! But it’s when you reach the middle that you’ll start to see how great this place is. It might not have the golden mosaics of St. Paul’s Cathedral but when you pass under the central screen you’ll see one of the most impressive sights in the whole of London – the dark chestnut-coloured stalls of the quire, ancient Cosmati pavement and golden altar where William and Kate got wed.
Just have a look up at that ceiling – it’s almost as tall as most buildings are long! You’ll get your first good look at a stained glass window here as well as the light floods down to a crowd enveloped in the smoggy smell of incense. I could have done with a bit more Handel on the headphones at this point because when it thunders up into Zadok the Priest I actually got a bit choked up (I’m getting very patriotic in my old age).
Burial tombs of kings and queens
After that you pass round the side of the altar where you can see all the beautiful little chapels and statues, and then you’ll head past the tombs of some our most famous kings and queens – people like Edward III, Henry III, Henry V (Battle of Agincourt) and Richard II (Peasant’s Revolt). And right in the centre is Edward the Confessor. Unfortunately the tomb itself is too precious to risk letting the tourist hordes near it because it’s nearly a thousand years old, so you can only view it from afar. (The audio-guide provides a little video of what it’s like inside.)
Henry VII and Elizabeth I in the Lady Chapel
At the very end of the Abbey is the single greatest room in the whole of London. No other one even comes close – not even the State Apartments at Buckingham Palace. It’s called the Henry VII Chapel and contains the graves of Henry VII (the first Tudor), Elizabeth I (Spanish Armada), Mary I (Bloody Mary) and James I (Gunpowder Plot). Round the side you’ll find Mary Queen of Scots and the ultimate mother-in-law from hell: Margaret Beaufort.
Remember to have a look inside the RAF Chapel as well because there’s a flagstone on the floor that marks the original burial site of Oliver Cromwell, before Charles II dug up his bones and hanged them at Tyburn.
Poets’ Corner and Coronation Chair
After that you’ll come to Poets’ Corner which is always busy with camera-clickers snapping at the statue of Shakespeare (he’s only there in spirit, because his body is buried at Stratford-upon-Avon). There are more than forty burials and sixty memorials here to the likes of Chaucer, Keats, Kipling, Dickens, Tennyson, Shelley, Eliot and Byron… the only big name that I would have liked to have seen there was Tolkien. I noticed that CS Lewis is there, so why not his buddy Tolkien?
After that you can have a wander round the gardens and enjoy some peace and quiet in the cloisters. When you get halfway round you’ll find the tiny Abbey Museum which has some wax effigies of the kings and queens. And then the route will take you back round for a final look at the Coronation Chair.
If you enjoy this then try Brompton Oratory (take a tube journey from Westminster to South Kensington); St. Paul’s Cathedral (take a tube journey from Westminster to St Pauls) and Westminster Cathedral (walk it in 12 mins or travel from Westminster to Victoria by tube)
