Sir Charles Barry, the architect selected to rebuild the Palace, faced a technically challenging site next to an open sewer and intense political scrutiny of a project that was to define the new political order. Even apparently mundane decisions – for example, the size of the press gallery or the number of committee rooms – could become politically contested.
Practical solutions and new purpose-built facilities were seen by some as an attempt to replace the sovereign deliberation of Parliament with the ‘unthinking’ methods of the modern factory.
Intriguingly, the political impasse would be broken by effectively turning the rebuilt Palace of Westminster into a cutting-edge scientific laboratory. In theory, a new consensus would form around ‘what worked’ while Parliament was partly decanted.
“There is a real flourishing of scientific culture after the Napoleonic Wars; science became fashionable and the redevelopment of Westminster gets caught up in that,” says Dr Ed Gillin, an academic based at UCL Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction and author of The Victorian Palace of Science.
“At places like the Royal Institution and the Royal Society, you get this huge overlap between the political class and the scientific elites, as well as a hope that the application of science can alleviate some of the rising social unrest and bring about national unity.”
For a brief period, nothing was off-limits. To give one example, in order to measure the foulness of the atmosphere in the House of Commons, lumps of meat were hung from the ceiling.
The experiment was devised by Dr David Boswell Reid, now dubbed ‘the grandfather of aircon’, a Scottish chemist brought to Westminster on account of his pioneering work in developing ventilation systems.
To win MPs over to the value of circulating fresh air, Reid hoped to demonstrate that while meat hung from 10 to 20 feet in the Chamber would go off within 24 hours, when suspended from 30 to 40 feet it could still be eaten safely several days later.
Reid was just one of a number of pioneering figures brought into Barry’s rebuilding project, as hundreds of innovations in everything from electric timekeeping to novel methods of drainage, as well as innovations in lighting and masonry, were explored.
It was a period when the status of architecture was also undergoing a rapid transformation. The first chair in architecture was created at UCL in 1841, a move that followed the creation in 1834 of the Institute of British Architects (which received its Royal Charter two years later). Part of this process entailed architects finding a balance between ‘art’ and ‘science’, which proved every bit as fractious as the political debates excited by Barry’s building.
While employing scientists might have helped to break the political impasse about the redevelopment of the Palace of Westminster, it will perhaps not be a huge surprise to learn that it did not end all argument.
Frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm for his theories, Reid began to devise ever more extreme demonstrations. To illustrate the effectiveness of his methods in dispersing ‘bad air’, he drafted a platoon of soldiers into the Chamber of the Commons and filled it with acrid smoke as well as a variety of scents from lavender to cinnamon. Despite the rapidity with which his smoke bombs cleared, MPs remained unconvinced.
“Reid begins his experiments at Westminster in 1835, is appointed to a permanent position in 1838, and is still experimenting in 1850,” explains Gillin.
“There’s just the sense that the experimenting has got a bit out of hand and Barry is driven absolutely mad by the stream of constant alterations.”
The contestability, and potential lack of durability of the scientists’ findings, made their recommendations risky and difficult to implement. Barry and his political backers slowly became impatient with visionary and experimental prototypes. Reliable methods that could be safely systemised were needed.
Disagreements over how far to incorporate new methods also played out along religious and class lines.
Barry had designed the Whiggish Reform Club building and was friends with Edward Cust, the politician overseeing the competition to rebuild the Houses of Parliament. By contrast, for illustrative example, Reid’s interest in ventilation was bound up with his evangelism; he saw the task of cleansing the atmosphere as inextricably bound up with the process of moral purification. It was a particular strand of religious thinking that marked Reid out as a Scot, and an outsider, whose ‘science’ could be more easily dismissed as crankery, whatever its practical effectiveness.
“The majority of MPs were Anglican, were educated at Oxbridge, and had a leaning towards ‘small c’ conservative sciences like geometry,” says Gillin, “whereas north of the border, science was associated with industry, practical uses of knowledge, and utilitarianism.”
While a handful of radicals wanted the new Houses of Parliament reconfigured into a centre of rational governance, most MPs wanted the new building to embody the continuing authority of Parliament and to forestall the kinds of instability that had led to the French Revolution.
Whiggish reformers had favoured rebuilding Parliament in a neo-classical style, while conservatives preferred a more regal gothic mode. By the time Barry had completed both Chambers in 1852, the end result was described as a gothic shell encasing a neo-classical interior.
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Without losing its sense of grandeur, Westminster had been rebuilt as a state-of-the-art building. It was a design able to contain the wildly differing preferences of those who fantasised about a pre-Reformation (Catholic) Britain as well as those politically and aesthetically centred in post-Reformation (Protestant) Britain.
For all that that enthusiasm for the renovation to exploit the benefits of rapid scientific advances helped unite competing factions, ultimately the visionary ambitions had to be tempered by a certain degree of nostalgia.
“A fashion for ‘the olden time’ – the period of the Tudors and early Stuarts romanticised as nationalist, mercantile, imperialist, even populist – spread rapidly in the 1830s and 40s,” explains professor Peter Mandler, a Cambridge historian, “and the Palace of Westminster could be seen as an early form of that fashion.”
In the 19th century as now, popular debates about the restoration of Parliament had shifted rapidly from material issues on to far more symbolic and intractable questions about the proper form of British government.
