In the summer of 1945 two of the great European Imperial parliaments lay in ruins. The Reichstag had been gutted by fire over a decade before and now bore fresher scars from the Battle of Berlin. In London, the Palace of Westminster had been badly bombed at the peak of the Blitz, leaving the Commons chamber utterly destroyed.
Both buildings were rebuilt, but their resurrected forms could not be more different. The German parliament languished for over five decades, unneeded by a divided country. Yet when the Berlin Wall fell, a newly unified Germany reclaimed the institution by creating a deliberately and strikingly modern structure.
The outer shell was left, pocked with bullet marks and defaced by Soviet graffiti. The new, modern interior culminated in a transparent dome – a sign to politicians that they must answer to the people outside. It was typical of a country that approaches its national history as if it were an inoculation, consciously exposing the evil in its past lest it ever be repeated.
The British parliament had no such reconfiguration. It was reconstructed largely as it was before: mock-Gothic, too small for the number of MPs, and lacking in ladies’ lavatories but replete with snuff boxes and even somewhere to hang your sword. The MPs who returned to the new commons seventy years ago this week would scarcely have noticed any differences to its predecessor.
That does not mean that this recreation was more unthinking or less meaningful than the German one, however. When the Commons chamber rose from the ashes, it was an allegory for our nation – bloodied but unbeaten by war, still draped in the trappings of its Victorian might. It was not a clear break with the past, but rather the grafting on of another layer of our history. It is an emblem not of rapid national renewal, but of seamless evolution. The Chamber has not sacrificed itself to the modern world but has rather provided a continuing narrative. It links the present with the past, and Britain is stronger for it.
It shows that institutions can evolve without throwing their essence away. The Commons has undoubtedly changed since 1945 – younger, more diverse in almost every way imaginable, but still linked tangibly to the fabric of the past.
There is something remarkable in that. Rather than requiring a complete rebuild, British democracy edges forward, linking the past and the present. Two women Prime Ministers and one female Speaker have commanded the same Chamber that women were once barred from entering, on pain of being arrested; Rishi Sunak now speaks from the same despatch box Enoch Powell once used. Though the building stays the same, everything else evolves.
It is an embodiment of the British constitution. The union of the unchanging and the emerging – a deference to tradition, underpinned with the understanding that there is more to conservatism than preserving things in a static, fossilised condition.
The current Commons is perhaps the prefect allegory for how we see our history. Parts of it medieval, much of it Victorian, but ultimately reinvigorated and rebuilt in the years after 1945. It shows how the new and old can sit side by side, and how it is content, not imagery, that matters. It also serves as a very visible sense of how our ancient institutions can be open to Britain in its modern state, an antidote to the iconoclastic “Year Zero” approach.
There are still two great ironies to the celebration of this anniversary. The first is that the Palace of Westminster is long overdue a reckoning with the practical legacies of its construction. The building is in many ways a death trap, riddled with asbestos, risky wiring and general decay. The Commons authorities continue fret over the cost and form of regeneration, caught between the need to preserve its history and fulfil its working functions.
Second, the very building that has been preserved is itself a piece of iconoclasm. When the ancient palace burned to the ground in 1834, the Victorians barely thought of rebuilding it as it was before the fire. They took the opportunity to replace it almost completely. Imbued with the confidence of an age of empire and industrialism, they were not shy about reshaping and replacing the old world – even if their “modern” Parliament was a neo-Gothic homage to Britain’s medieval heritage.
Perhaps there lies another lesson here – that history and tradition is what you make of it. We have chosen to combine the veneration of the past with the fluidity of the modern. Our relationship with our history is a constant dialogue of preservation, celebration and condemnation. The Palace of Westminster exemplifies that and ties it to our politics and constitution – always old, yet always new.
