London, England
The church where every king and queen of England has been crowned since 1066, and where seventeen of them are buried, with Newton, Darwin, Dickens and three thousand others. It is crowded with the dead. It is also a parish church with a choir that sings every day.
Photo: Philip Pankhurst, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are inside a very tall, narrow building of grey stone, lit from high windows. It should feel empty, and it does not. Every wall is covered with white marble people: admirals leaning on cannon, judges in wigs, women weeping over urns. The floor under your feet is made of names.
The first church here was finished at Christmas 1065, and a king was buried in it a week later. In China, in the Northern Song (960–1127), the scholar Sima Guang was just beginning his great history of the dynasties.
One ticket covers the church, the cloister and the Chapter House. The galleries in the roof are extra.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The west front and the ten statues | Free, from the street |
| The nave and the Unknown Warrior | 32 pounds, the one ticket |
| The royal tombs and Henry VII's chapel | Included |
| Poets' Corner | Included |
| The cloister and Chapter House | Included |
| The Coronation Chair | Included |
| The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries | Extra ticket; opens later and closes earlier |
| Services, including Evensong | Free; no sightseeing |
The king was Edward, called the Confessor for his piety. A hundred years after his death the pope declared him a saint. In 1245 another king, Henry III, pulled down Edward's church and began this one, in the new pointed style of France, as a great stone box to hold the saint's bones.
Kings wished to lie near the saint, and nobles near the kings. After the monks were sent away in 1540 the church kept filling: with poets, generals, scientists, actors. By 1900 there was almost no floor left.
The place where the crown is put on is the square of floor between the choir and the altar. Forty kings and queens have been crowned on it.
"It is an abbey." There have been no monks here since 1540. It is not a cathedral either, since it has no bishop. It belongs directly to the monarch.
"It is the church with the big clock tower." That is the Houses of Parliament, across the road. The church with the dome is St Paul's, three kilometres away.
"The two towers are medieval." They were added in 1745. Everything behind them is five hundred years older.
"Shakespeare is buried here." He has a statue. He is buried at Stratford, his home town. Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters also have only their names here.
"Kings are still buried here." The last was George II in 1760. Since then they have gone to Windsor.
Visitors go in by the north door and round the church one way. The stops follow that route, after a look at the west front.
Above the great door, under the towers, ten statues stand in niches that were empty for five hundred years. They were put up in 1998 and show Christians killed for their faith in the twentieth century.
Among them are Martin Luther King, shot in America in 1968, and Wang Zhiming, a pastor of the Miao people of Yunnan in south-west China, who was put to death in 1973.
The nave is thirty-one metres high, the tallest in England, and narrow, so that it seems taller. It took a hundred and fifty years to build, and the masons of 1500 copied the style of 1260 exactly so that no one could see the join.
In the middle of the floor near the west door is a slab of black marble edged with red paper poppies. Under it lies a British soldier of the First World War whose name nobody knows. He was chosen from among the unidentified dead in France and buried here on 11 November 1920, in earth brought from the battlefields.
It is the only grave in the church that no one walks on. Kings and queens step round it. Royal brides send their flowers to be laid on it the day after the wedding.
Against the screen at the end of the nave, on the left, a man in a Roman robe leans on a pile of books under a globe of the heavens. This is Isaac Newton, buried here in 1727 with the honours of a duke. A French visitor wrote in astonishment that England buried a mathematician like a king.
A few steps away in the floor is a plain stone with the name Charles Darwin, 1882. The Church had fought his ideas for twenty years. When he died, it asked for his body.
Between the two, since 2018, are the ashes of Stephen Hawking. His stone shows a black hole and carries one of his equations.
Past the choir stalls you come to the centre of the church. The floor in front of the altar is a carpet of coloured stone, laid by Italian workmen in 1268: circles inside squares inside circles, in purple, green and gold. A Latin riddle round the edge works out the age at which the world will end.
The Coronation Chair is carried here and set on this floor, facing the altar. Forty kings and queens have been crowned on this spot, the last on 6 May 2023. Royal weddings and funerals are held here too.
Behind the altar, raised above the level of the church, is the shrine of Edward the Confessor. You see it from the walk that runs round it. The stone base of 1269 is real. Pilgrims knelt in the niches in its sides to be near the bones.
Round the saint, in a ring, lie five kings and four queens. One tomb is a plain chest of grey marble with no figure on it. It belongs to Edward I, who died in 1307 on his way to fight the Scots, and its painted words call him their hammer.
Up a flight of steps at the east end is a second church, built between 1503 and 1519. Look up. The stone roof spreads into fans, and from the fans hang carved stone lanterns that seem to have nothing holding them. It is the last and most daring thing the medieval masons of England did.
In the left aisle is the tomb of Elizabeth I, in white marble, with her face taken from a death mask. Her half-sister Mary, who had imprisoned her, lies underneath in the same grave. In the right aisle, in a taller tomb, is Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had beheaded. Mary's son, when he became king of England, built both.
The south arm of the church is the most crowded of all. Chaucer's tomb is against the east wall, small and grey. Round it are the graves of Dickens, Tennyson, Kipling and the composer Handel, and the names of nearly everyone else who has written well in English.
Dickens asked in his will for a quiet funeral in the country. The newspapers demanded the Abbey. He was buried here early on a June morning in 1870 with twelve people present, and the grave was left open for two days so that London could walk past.
Mortality, behold and fear! What a change of flesh is here! Think how many royal bones Sleep within this heap of stones
Francis Beaumont, On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey, about 1610
A door from the south aisle leads into the monks' cloister. Off it is an eight-sided room with a single thin pillar in the middle, built about 1250 for the monks' daily meeting. The House of Commons met here in the 1300s, before it had a home. The tiled floor is the one they stood on.
In the passage beside it is a small wooden door that has hung there since the 1050s. It is the oldest door in Britain.
You leave past a glass case by the west door. In it is a tall oak chair with a pointed back, much scratched. Edward I had it made in 1300 to hold a block of sandstone he had carried off from Scotland, on which the Scottish kings had been crowned. Every English coronation since has used the chair.
The scratches are names. For two centuries the boys of the school next door were let in to carve them. One reads: "P. Abbott slept in this chair 5–6 July 1800." The stone went home to Scotland in 1996.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1065 | The first great church is finished | Northern Song China: Sima Guang begins his history; four years later Wang Anshi starts his reforms |
| 1066 | William the Conqueror is crowned | The same year; the comet later named after Halley is seen in both countries |
| 1245 | Henry III begins the present church | Southern Song (1127–1279) China (1127–1279); the Mongols have reached the edge of Europe |
| 1400 | Chaucer is buried | Ming China (1368–1644); five years before Zheng He's first voyage |
| 1503 | Henry VII's chapel is begun | Ming China, the Hongzhi reign; Leonardo starts the Mona Lisa |
| 1727 | Newton is buried | Qing China, the fifth year of the Yongzheng reign |
| 1745 | The west towers are finished | The Qianlong reign in China; Bach is at work on his last great pieces |
| 1920 | The Unknown Warrior is buried | Two years after the First World War; a year before the Communist Party of China is founded |
| 1953 | Elizabeth II is crowned, on television | The same week Everest is climbed; China begins its first five-year plan |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
On the night before the first church was to be blessed, a stranger asked a Thames fisherman to row him across. The fisherman saw the church fill with light and heard singing. The stranger came back, said he was St Peter and had blessed the church himself, and told the man to cast his net. It came up full of salmon.
Source: Sulcard, monk of Westminster, about 1080
The stone under the chair was the pillow on which Jacob slept in the Bible and dreamed of a ladder to heaven. It was carried to Egypt, to Spain, to Ireland and at last to Scotland, and it groans aloud when a true king sits on it.
Source: Scottish chronicles from the fourteenth century
When the English came for the stone in 1296, the monks of Scone hid the real one and gave them a lump cut from the nearest quarry. The true stone has never been found.
Source: Scottish tradition; geologists confirm only that the stone is local sandstone from near Scone
A monk in a brown habit walks in the cloister at dusk, a little above the level of the present floor, and speaks politely to visitors before passing through the wall.
Source: Stories told by Abbey staff since the 1900s
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The Abbey's own site (westminster-abbey.org), prices and entry times as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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