Westminster Abbey stands beside the Houses of Parliament, in the heart of London. It’s official name is Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster. Kings and queens are crowned here, many of them are buried here, and so are some of the greatest scientists and writers in Britain. A minster is a large church tied to a monastery. London has two of them. This one, west of the old city, was the west minster, to tell it apart from Cathedral Church of St Paul the Apostle, the east minster in the City of London.

The West Minster

The site was once Thorney Island, a patch of marshy ground on the edge of the River Thames. Benedictine monks lived here before the abbey we know was built. King Edward the Confessor built a large new church around 1045 to 1050. The story goes that he had broken a vow to make a pilgrimage to Rome, and the Pope allowed him to make up for it by building a church to Saint Peter. The church was consecrated, blessed for use, on 28 December 1065. Edward was on his deathbed and could not attend. He died on 5 January 1066 and was buried in his new church a week later.

That year began a tradition. Edward’s successor Harold was probably crowned here, and the first recorded coronation is that of William the Conqueror, on Christmas Day 1066. Since then almost every English and British monarch has been crowned in the abbey, forty coronations in all, the latest being Charles III in 2023. Only Edward V and Edward VIII, neither of whom was crowned at all, broke the line.

Henry III’s Church

Almost nothing of Edward’s church survives. Henry III admired Edward, who had been made a saint in 1161. In 1245 Henry pulled most of the old church down and began a new one in the Gothic style of France, with pointed arches, tall windows and ribbed stone ceilings. He built it as a shrine for Edward and as a fitting place for his own tomb. It has the highest Gothic nave in England. In 1269 Edward’s body was moved into the new building. The work went on for more than two centuries, and the design stayed so consistent that the whole church looks as if it was built at once.

Henry VII added the last great piece. In 1503 he laid the foundation stone of the Lady Chapel, a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, famous for its fan vaulting, a stone ceiling carved into shapes like open fans. The western towers came much later, built between 1722 and 1745 by Nicholas Hawksmoor.

The Monarchs and the Stone of Destiny

Many kings and queens lie near the shrine of Edward the Confessor or in Henry VII’s chapel, and from Henry III to George II sixteen monarchs were buried here. Elizabeth I shares a tomb with her half sister Mary I, and nearby lies Mary, Queen of Scots, the cousin Elizabeth had executed.

The Coronation Chair is in permanent display at the Church and has a curious historical fact. For centuries Scottish kings were inaugurated on a block of sandstone kept at Scone Abbey, near Perth, a place then at the center of the Scottish kingdom. It became known as the Stone of Scone, or the Stone of Destiny. The last Scottish king crowned on it was John Balliol, in 1292. When Edward I of England invaded Scotland four years later in 1296, his forces seized the stone and carried it to London. Edward had the Coronation Chair built to hold it, carved from oak between the summer of 1297 and March 1300 by the carpenter Walter of Durham For Edward the message was plain: by moving the stone to London, he was declaring himself King of the Scots. For the next seven hundred years, English and then British monarchs were crowned sitting above it.

In the early hours of Christmas Day 1950, four students from the University of Glasgow, Scottish nationalists, broke into the abbey to take it home. They dragged it across the tiled floor on a raincoat, and as they lifted it out of the chair it fell and broke. The students escaped to Scotland, where the stone was repaired in Glasgow while it stayed hidden. On 11 April 1951 it turned up on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, the place where the Declaration of Arbroath was signed in 1320, and it was returned to Westminster in time for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953.

In 1996 the British government returned the stone to Scotland for good, on one condition: it would still be used at future coronations. On 30 November 1996, St Andrew’s Day, around 10,000 people lined the Royal Mile in Edinburgh to watch it carried up to Edinburgh Castle, where it was displayed alongside the Scottish crown jewels. Since 2024 it has been kept at the museum in Perth, not far from Scone. The stone still belongs to the Crown, and its keepers must send it back to Westminster Abbey for every coronation. In May 2023 it made the journey south for the coronation of Charles III and then went home again.

Surviving the Reformation

When Henry VIII closed the monasteries, the monks at Westminster lost their abbey, but its royal links saved the building from destruction. Henry’s Catholic daughter Mary brought the Benedictines back. Elizabeth I removed them again in 1559. In 1579 she made Westminster a Royal Peculiar, a church answerable directly to the monarch rather than to a bishop. It has kept that status ever since. There are other Peculiars around England.

Scientists’ Corner

The scientists gather in the nave, around the grave of Sir Isaac Newton. He died in Kensington on 20 March 1727. His body lay in state in the abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber, and most of the Fellows of the Royal Society followed his coffin to its grave on 28 March. His grave is covered by a grey marble slab, with a Latin line that reads: here lies what was mortal of Isaac Newton. His large monument stands against the choir screen, the stone wall that separates the nave from the choir. It is decorated with mathematical instruments and celestial bodies.

Charles Darwin joined him in 1882. Darwin was buried in the north aisle of the nave, next to the astronomer Sir John Herschel, under a simple stone of pale Carrara marble. He was one of only five people outside the royal family buried in the abbey in the nineteenth century.

In 2018 Stephen Hawking’s ashes were buried between Newton and Darwin. Hawking held the same Cambridge post Newton once held, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. His stone carries his equation for Hawking radiation, the heat that black holes give off, and the English version of Newton’s epitaph: here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking.

Other scientists lie nearby. Lord Kelvin, who studied heat and energy, and Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus, are both buried here, as is J.J. Thomson, who discovered the electron. The geologist Sir Charles Lyell, whose work on the slow shaping of the Earth influenced Darwin, and the railway engineer Robert Stephenson are buried in the nave.

Some of the names are memorials only. Their stones carry the Latin words alibi sepulti, buried elsewhere. Michael Faraday is buried at Highgate Cemetery in London. James Clerk Maxwell is buried in Scotland. The physicist Paul Dirac has a floor stone carved with his equation for the electron. There are also memorials to James Prescott Joule, and Howard Florey. A truly remarkable corner where some of the most brilliant British minds rest or are honored.

Poets’ Corner

Across the church, in the south transept, lie the writers. The first was Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales. He was buried here in 1400, not as a poet but because he worked for the king and lived in the abbey grounds. Later writers were buried near him, among them Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and Rudyard Kipling. There are memorials to William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, who are buried elsewhere. The ashes of the actor Laurence Olivier are here too.

The Unknown Warrior

At the west end of the nave lies the Grave of the Unknown Warrior. In 1920 the body of an unidentified British soldier was brought back from the battlefields of the First World War and buried here, in memory of all those who died with no known grave. By tradition, no one walks on it. Nearby is a memorial stone to Winston Churchill. He is not buried in the abbey. His grave is at Bladon, near Blenheim Palace, where he was born.