The most extraordinary things in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries are the galleries themselves. Suddenly you see a huge chunk of Westminster Abbey that has never been open to the public since Henry III rebuilt the place in 1250.
They are literally a revelation – like stumbling on an extra ballroom at Versailles, or finding a Rembrandt in the cupboard under the stairs.
The galleries are housed in Westminster Abbey’s triforium, 52 feet above the abbey floor. In most big churches, the triforium is a narrow passage running at first-floor level around the nave and chancel.
At Westminster Abbey, the triforium is enormously wide, flanked by vast lancets and rose windows which give staggering views over the Palace of Westminster. Look the other way, inside the abbey, along the length of the nave, and you see what John Betjeman called “the best view in Europe”.
To get to the new triforium, you climb the abbey’s first new tower in nearly 300 years – a subtle exercise by Ptolemy Dean in modern Gothic, squirreled away behind Poets’ Corner, clad in the 17 different stones used on the abbey – from the Purbeck stone used by Edward the Confessor in his 1050 abbey to the Clipsham stone in 20th-century restorations.
The most striking thing you see when you climb the new tower is Christopher Wren’s 1716 wooden model of his planned tower. If only it had been built – the abbey is a sublime building, but how it lacks a tower on the scale of, say, Salisbury Cathedral’s.
Nearby is the Westminster Retable (1269), the oldest surviving altarpiece in England – thought to be Henry III’s original abbey altarpiece. Like so many of the objects here, it’s a reminder of the abbey’s Catholic roots, and its Gothic nature. The picture of St Peter clutching his key with carefully splayed fingers is much battered – but the mobility of his limbs and the rich folds of his blue gown still show how English Gothic art was as good as its continental counterpart.
The abbey’s earliest roots are, in fact, pre-Catholic – as a crisply lettered Roman sarcophagus from about 350AD, found near the abbey in 1869, shows.
As the nation’s principal regal shrine, the galleries are rich in royal treasures. The 1382 Liber Regalis, or Royal Book, is essentially a manual for staging coronations and royal funerals. The format was largely followed at the Queen’s 1953 coronation. Here’s hoping Prince Charles took a good look at the Liber Regalis when he opened the galleries with his mother on June 8 – and that he doesn’t fiddle around with the service too much.
He must have looked rather longingly, too, at Mary II’s Coronation Chair, commissioned as an extra to the original Coronation Chair of 1300 for William and Mary’s coronation in 1689. Both chairs are covered in graffiti by boys from Westminster School – my alma mater, I fear.
The royal and the religious chime most movingly in the funeral effigies and achievements of our monarchs. They are really quite extraordinary survivals. Chief among them are Henry V’s helmet and Henry VII’s funeral effigy bust of 1509 – an early burst of the Renaissance in England by Pietro Torrigiano, the sculptor who broke Michelangelo’s nose when they were young sculptors together in Florence and Michelangelo overdid the banter.
By the Georgian period, the abbey had become a Valhalla for national heroes. It became in part a sort of grand Madame Tussauds with effigies on show, not just of monarchs, but also of Pitt the Elder and Lord Nelson.
That dual religious-royal position of the abbey continues today. It’s caught movingly in Ralph Heimans’s Diamond Jubilee portrait of the Queen staring at the spot where she was crowned, on the Cosmati Pavement – the 1268 floor, designed by Italian craftsmen, in the heart of the abbey. You get a lovely view, incidentally, of the Cosmati Pavement from the new galleries.
Prince William and Kate Middleton’s marriage licence looks a little gaudy now but it will, one day, seem as ancient and integral a part of the abbey’s treasures as the 30,000 fragments of medieval glass found under the floor of the triforium during the construction of the galleries.
The fragments have now been reincorporated into the windows of the bridge that connects the triforium with the new tower.
The new galleries present an unparalleled sandwich of layers of English history: of the monarchy, the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, and the country itself.
In Little Gidding, TS Eliot wrote:
So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
How true that is of a summer’s morning in our national church.
Harry Mount is the author of How England Made the English (Penguin). The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries, open Monday to Saturday (westminster-abbey.org)
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