VENERABLE
AND VULNERABLE
Britain’s Houses of Parliament are falling down.
Can they be saved in time? By Billy PerrigoWorld
Andy PiPer wAs worried About the
Houses of Parliament. Not what goes on in-
side them, but the buildings themselves—the
ornate debating chambers and wood- paneled
rooms where the U.K.’s legislative body goes
about its business. Chosen as design director
for Parliament’s restoration program, Piper
had the job of alerting lawmakers to the state
of the houses of state. So in summer 2017, he
took the then leader of the House of Commons,
Conservative lawmaker Andrea Leadsom, on a
tour of the building’s darkest corners.
Piper hoped to show Leadsom a few fire
hazards and maybe an unsafe cable or two. As
the Cabinet member responsible for organiz-
ing government business, she could draw more
attention to the issue. But when he unlocked
the door to the parliamentary basement, the
stench hit them both. Raw sewage was ooz-
ing down the corridor. “We couldn’t walk all
the way through the basement,” Leadsom, now
Business Secretary, recalls. “We had to go back
and enter from the other end.” Far from beingembarrassed by the incident, Piper was over-
joyed. “It was very convenient for us,” he says.
“She probably thought we had set it up.”
The Palace of Westminster, as the estate is
formally known, is in disrepair. Its facade looks
sturdy from a distance, but up close it’s held
together only by the grime of decades. In the
basement, Victorian- era pipes carry pressur-
ized steam just inches from high-voltage ca-
bles. Asbestos lines the walls. Staff members
upstairs count getting trapped in elevators as
an occupational hazard. Most of the nearly
4,000 bronze-framed windows don’t close
properly, letting warm air out and cold rain
in. The alarm system is so unreliable that at
least two wardens patrol the building looking
for fires, day and night, all year round. Even
the gilded chambers where lawmakers sit
aren’t immune to decay. In April, a debate in
the House of Commons was cut short by water
leaking from the ceiling. That day, the upkeep
team was lucky. On bad days, the leaks come
instead from the 130-year-old sewage system.
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