‘We shape our buildings’, Winston Churchill once said, ‘and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ Maybe this is the problem, says Matthew Flinders. He argues that the architecture and design of a building says a lot about the values, principles and priorities of those working within it. If we really want to breathe new life into British democracy then the dilapidation of the Palace of Westminster offers huge opportunities.
‘London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down; London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady’. ‘Oh no it’s not!’ I hear you all scream with oodles of post-Christmas pantomime cheer but Parliament is apparently falling down. A number of restoration and renewal studies of the Palace of Westminster have provided the evidence with increasingly urgency. The cost of rebuilding the House? A mere £2 billion! If it was any other building in the world its owners would be advised to demolish and rebuild. Let’s design fordemocracy – Let’s do it! Let’s rip it up and start again!
The Georgian Parliament building might be a rather odd place to begin this New Year blog about British politics but the visionary architecture behind the stunning new building in Kutaisi, Georgia’s legislative capital, offers important insights for those who care about British politics.
Put very simply, the architecture and design of a building says a lot about the values, principles and priorities of those working within it. The old parliament building in Tblisi was a stone pillared fortress that reflected the politics of the soviet era whereas the new parliament is intended to offer a very public statement about a new form of politics. Its style and design may not be too everyone’s taste – a forty-meter high glass dome that looks like a cross between an alien spaceship and a frog’s eye – but the use of curved glass maximises transparency and openness. It represents the antithesis of the stone pillared fortress that went before it.

I’m not suggesting that the London Eye is suddenly upstaged by the creation of a new frog-eye dome on the other side of the Thames but I am arguing in favour of a little creative destruction. Or to make the same point slightly differently, if we are to spend £2 billion in an age of austerity – and probably far more once the whole refurbishment is complete – then surely we need to spend a little time designing for democracy. Designing for democracy is something that imbued the architecture of the new Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly of Wales, it also underpinned the light and space of the Portcullis House addition to the Palace of Westminster.
The importance of Portcullis House is important. The underground corridor that connects the ‘old’ Palace of Westminster with the ‘new’ Portcullis House is far more than a convenient pathway: it is a time warp that takes the tired MP or the thrusting new intern back and forward between the centuries. The light, modern and spacious atmosphere of Portcullis House creates an environment in which visitors can relax, committees can operate and politicians can – dare I say – smile. The atmosphere in the Palace of Westminster is quite different. It is dark and dank. It is as if it has been designed to be off-putting and impenetrable. It is ‘Hogwarts on Thames’ which is great if you have been brought up in an elite public school environment but bad if you did not. It has that smell – you know the one I mean – the smell of private privilege, of a very male environment, of money and assumptions of ‘class’. It is not ‘fit for purpose’ and everyone knows it. And yet we are about to spend billions of pounds rebuilding and reinforcing this structure.
There is, however, a deeper dimension to this plea to take designing for democracy seriously: architecture matters. The structure of Parliament – in terms of the seating and the corridors, the secretive snugs and the lack of visitor amenities, through to the lack of windows and the dominance of dark wood – represents the physical manifestation of that ‘traditional’ mode of British politics that is now so publicly derided. The structure delivers the adversarial politics that now turns so many people off.
The Palace of Westminster should be a museum, not the institutional heart of British politics. In recent years the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament have made great strides in terms of ‘opening up’ Parliament, but modernisation in any meaningful sense is fundamentally prevented by the listed status if the building. A window of opportunity for radical reform did open-up when an incendiary bomb hit the chamber of the House of Commons on 11 May 1941. The issue of designing for democracy was debated by MPs with many favouring a transition to a horseshoe or semi-circular design. But in the end, and with the strong encouragement of Winston Churchill, a decision was taken to rebuild the chamber as it had been before in order to reinforce the traditional two-party system. ‘We shape our buildings’ Churchill argued ‘and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ Maybe this is the problem.
The refurbishment of Parliament has so far escaped major public debate and engagement. And yet if we really want to breathe new life into British democracy then the dilapidation of the Palace of Westminster offers huge opportunities. The 2015 General Election is therefore something of a distraction from the more basic issue of how we design for democracy in the twenty-first century. Less MPs but with more resources? Less shouting and more listening? A chamber that can actually seat all of its members? Why not base Parliament outside of London and in one of the new ‘Northern powerhouses’ (Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle, but definitely not Leeds) that politicians seem suddenly so keen on? £2 billion is a major investment in the social and political infrastructure of the country so let’s be very un-British in our approach, let’s design for democracy – Let’s do it! Let’s rip it up and start again!
Note: This article was originally published on the Oxford University Press blog and gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting. Featured image credit: Spartaky CC BY-SA 3.0
Matthew Flinders is Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is also Chair of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom and is Visiting Distinguished Professor of Governance and Public Policy at Murdoch University in Western Australia. He loves Parliament but despairs of parliamentary politics and its modus operandi.
‘the smell of private privilege, of a very male environment, of money and assumptions of ‘class’.’
Exactly. That’s what its all about.
God save the palace of Parliament.
God save the Queen!
Yes, time for Parliament to grow up, join the modern world and become more relevant to the People. A new building is required outside of London and designed to be a proper debating chamber ( no more the archaic division by two sword lengths ). This should help to make politics more relevant and attractive to the electors. Certainly repair the Palace of Westminster and turn it into a tourist attraction where visitors can experience actors debating some of the issues of the past ( plenty of yah-boo action !)
The only benefit from a new parliamentary building would be for the profits of the property developers and construction companies.
Since the height of the Roman empire, parliamentary buildings and debating chambers have merely been vessels for display of ego. It is a distraction for the participants and for the audience.
Governments should govern without the need to constantly display themselves and without the need to trawl through the spurious process of debate.
I say let the Palace of Westminster fall slowly into the Thames until it is gone completely along with its archaic procedures.
And what the heck has Matthew Flinders ever done for this country to be given such a platform to spout his personal point of view..
He’s a British citizen, and therefore he has the right to free speech, just like you have the right to hate.
There are many British citizens in this country last time I checked. No they don’t have the opportunity to put about their personal views on such national importance in this way. Why should one person have such opportunities when others have none. Same point why does one person assume such rights to spout a personal point of view. It appears arrogant and self important. Better he wrote an article concerning public consultation and then worked to provide methods of communication that all manner of society could get involved in. That is better addressed in a systematic fashion which in turn is usually low key and not about self.
‘The About the Author’ section forgot to mention that Matthew Flinders has a chip on his shoulder the size of a house
I would put in a bid for the Parliament to be sited close to Birmingham. It has good road and rail connections to all parts of the country and if it is near to the NEC, there is also an ajacent international airport.
And why not Leeds?
More to the point, I agree that parliament should and could’ve been based outside London. Britain should have taken a leaf out of the American, Canadian, Brazilian and Australian books where their capital cities are not their biggest, most overcrowded ones. Heck, the Brazilians even went to the extent of creating a new capital from scratch, Brasilia, in the ’50’s.
A pity that a new town / city was not chosen or perhaps better still created anew to be the new British capital post WW2. I rather think we’re stuck with Westminster out of a misplaced loyalty to tradition.
HERE HERE! Agree wholeheartedly.