block in west London. Holes cut through
walls to accommodate gas pipes allowed
smoke and fire to spread from apartment
to apartment. Residents trapped at the
top livestreamed their final moments as
people on the ground watched helplessly.
Seventy-two people died.
Grenfell was partly the result of au-
thorities neglecting the housing of poor,
mostly ethnic-minority residents. But it
was also a failure of design, and Tami is
worried that Parliament could suffer a
similar tragedy. “There are people who
work at the very top of the main cham-
ber.” He sighs. “For some of them, there’s
not an easy route out.”
The risks facing ParliamenT, where
some 8,000 people work each day, aren’t
limited to fire. Last year, a large chunk of
stone fell from Victoria Tower, the tallest
part of the palace, right onto the entrance
to the House of Lords. “If that had landed
on somebody, it would have killed them
instantly,” Piper says.
After that, workers went around with
buckets, prodding at suspect stonework
and removing loose masonry. “When
they started cleaning the structure, a lot
of it just fell away because the dirt and
grime was actually holding everything
together,” says Tami. Now, much of the
building is covered in netting. “I’ve been
here six years,” Piper says, “but in the last
18 months I’ve felt the difference. The
extreme potential for the building to kill
people is becoming more obvious.”
Another problem is the arcane plumb-
ing. On one occasion in 2016, the unfortu-
nate occupants of one room all had to get
hepatitis shots after a pipe exploded, bring-
ing the ceiling down in a rain of excrement.Traveling deeper into the basement
down a dank flight of stairs, we can smell
the sewage room before we see it. Here are
the ejectors—giant cauldrons into which
the palace’s toilets drain, where the waste
of British lawmakers from William Glad-
stone to Theresa May has sat waiting to
be expelled into the London sewage sys-
tem. “The basement is more likely to flood
from rain than anything else,” Piper says
in an attempt at reassurance. But he has
discovered the room “pretty deep” in sew-
age more than once. These ejectors will be
stripped out in the refurbishment along
with the rest of the basement, he says,
slapping one of the rough iron spheres,
which responds with a hollow thrum.
“There’s 130 years of history in these,”
he adds with a smile. “It tells some sort
of story. I’m just not sure what.”
Despite the risks, some lawmakers
have long resisted efforts to evacuate.
“There was this idea that if we leave
here, we’re never coming back,” Tami
says. “I think that was particularly true
for the members of the House of Lords,”
he says of the upper chamber of Parlia-
ment, where the average age is 70.
Even with plans now actually in place
to vacate the palace, progress is still slow.
On the current timeline, lawmakers and
their staff won’t move out until 2025 at
the earliest, when the alternative cham-
bers and offices across the road are finally
finished. The total cost of the restoration
is expected to be around $5 billion. “It is
quite a challenging deadline,” says Peace,
the chair of the restoration board. When
lawmakers do eventually go, she says, the
work is expected to take an additional six
to eight years, meaning the palace stands
to be out of action until well into the
2030s. Nobody knows how Britain will
look at that point. “Right now is not the
ideal time,” Tami says of the need to evac-
uate Parliament amid Brexit, the biggest
challenge Britain has faced in generations.
There’s also a chance that the new
Prime Minister could undo the plans to
refurbish the building, consigning law-
makers to remain in the Palace of West-
minster as it falls apart around them.
Shenton is pessimistic. “Politicians’ atti-
tudes today are as they were in the early
19th century,” she says, casting her gaze
back to the years before the 1834 blaze.
“I don’t believe that history repeats itself.
But human nature does.” ^
Scaffolding covers much of the
palace’s blackened walls, partly to
protect people from falling stone