Palace of Westminster

The Houses of Parliament on the Thames in London, England.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
The Multi-Billion Pound Race to Save Parliament	The B1M	subject	A tour of a crumbling building and the decades-long, multi-billion-pound options for saving it.

So this is the basement of the Houses of Parliament or the Palace of Westminster, to give it its proper name.

Role: subject
In the video: The presenter goes below ground into a basement nicknamed “the submarine”, with more than 400 km of cabling and “150 years worth of services sediment”, because old systems are left in place when new ones go in. He stands in Cloister Court, dating from 1529, where Charles I’s death warrant is believed to have been signed; it survived the 1834 fire, was bombed in the Second World War and rebuilt in 1950. The options: a full move-out to Richmond House and the Queen Elizabeth II Centre over 19 to 24 years for £8.4 to £11.5 billion, or phased work in 14 zones over 38 to 61 years for £11.8 to £18.7 billion. The video ends in the near-1,000-year-old Westminster Hall.
Why it matters: The building is the whole subject; the argument is that its fire risk and decay make the cost unavoidable.