Westminster Abbey: a building of three periods

Henry III’s Gothic church

The Abbey reads as one building, but its fabric was made in distinct campaigns. In 1245 Henry III pulled down the eastern part of the eleventh-century church that Edward the Confessor had founded and dedicated in 1065, and began rebuilding in the Gothic style. By 1269 the apse, radiating chapels, transepts and quire were complete, and the church was consecrated on 13 October that year.

Gothic here means pointed arches and ribbed vaults, with flying buttresses carrying the outward thrust of the high roof. The vault reaches nearly 102 feet, the highest Gothic vault in England; the aisles were kept narrow to make it look higher still. The proportions are an argument as much as a structure, and they set the standard that later builders had to match.

A nave finished by other hands

The nave is the long western body of the church, where a congregation gathers; the quire, further east, is the part used by the choir and clergy. Henry III died in 1272 with only one bay of the nave built beyond the quire screen. The western section was carried on by Abbot Nicholas Litlyngton, using money bequeathed by Cardinal Simon Langham, his predecessor as abbot, and work continued slowly for nearly 150 years.

Litlyngton probably insisted that the general design of Henry III’s masons be followed, which gave the Abbey much of its architectural unity. The master mason Henry Yevele made only minor alterations; the diaper or rosette pattern in the spandrels, the triangular spaces between the arches and the line above them, was dropped in the nave, and other details are plainer than the older work. The apparent unity of the interior was therefore a decision, maintained over generations, rather than one uninterrupted build.

West towers, 1745

The top parts of the west towers were left unfinished for centuries. The last phase of building was their completion in 1745 in Portland stone, to a design by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the Abbey’s Surveyor; John James, his successor, finished the work. The twin towers that frame the west front are therefore Georgian additions to a medieval church. The great west window and the rose window in the north transept date from the early eighteenth century, and most of the remaining glass is nineteenth-century or later. The front is best read as a composite, not as a single medieval design.

A Royal Peculiar

The Abbey is neither a cathedral nor a parish church. Its correct title is the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster, and it is a Royal Peculiar under the jurisdiction of a Dean and Chapter, subject only to the Sovereign and not to any archbishop or bishop. It has been Britain’s coronation church since 1066, when William the Conqueror was crowned. The building’s architecture and its constitutional oddity are separate subjects, but both explain why the Abbey is not simply the Palace’s neighbour.

Reading the Abbey from the street

Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge are the neighbouring cameras, and both are useful for the surrounding streets rather than the fabric: the Abbey stands within its own precinct, which those frames are not composed to show. If a large church appears, name only what you can defend, such as a run of buttresses, a pointed window or a tower, then match it to a period described above. If no church appears, record the street relationship instead. The Abbey’s own account explains the whole elevation far better than a road picture can.

Follow the campaigns

The building was made in phases spanning five centuries, with long pauses in between. Choose a campaign below to see which part of the church it produced, and switch on the diaper pattern to see one detail the later nave left out.

A composite, not one design

Hold the two facts together: the Abbey looks unified, and it was built by people who were not contemporaries. The unity comes from a decision to keep faith with an earlier design, and the differences survive in small details. A photograph that shows the west front is therefore showing both a medieval church and a Georgian finish, with nineteenth-century glass behind. Reading it well means naming the campaign rather than assigning the whole building to a single date, and treating the apparent seamlessness as an achievement rather than a plain fact.