Curious history · Art & architecture

Parliament burned down because of obsolete accounting sticks

On the night of 16 October 1834 the old Palace of Westminster, the sprawling medieval home of the British parliament, burned down almost entirely. The cause was almost absurdly mundane: workers clearing out two cartloads of obsolete wooden tally sticks, once used by the Exchequer for accounting, had been burning them in furnaces beneath the House of Lords designed for coal, not wood. The excess heat and open furnace doors set the flues alight, and years of neglected warnings about the building's fire risk, its lack of firebreaks, and its maze of wooden corridors let the blaze spread unchecked through St Stephen's Chapel, the Painted Chamber, and the Speaker's residence. Thousands of Londoners gathered to watch, some cheering the destruction as a judgment on unpopular legislation, while firefighters under James Braidwood managed, at real cost to the rest of the complex, to save Westminster Hall by cutting away connecting roofs and soaking it down.

No one died, but the losses were severe: centuries of Commons records, the Painted Chamber, and Britain's official standard measures of the yard and pound all perished, while Westminster Hall, the Jewel Tower, and a few newer buildings survived largely intact. A Privy Council inquiry confirmed the tally-stick furnace as the culprit and criticised the lack of proper supervision, quashing rumours of arson or gas explosions. The disaster forced a rethink of public record-keeping, leading to a new Public Record Office, and prompted a lengthy overhaul of Britain's weights and measures system after the destroyed standards had to be painstakingly recast. It also drew painters like Turner and Constable to sketch the flames, making it one of the most depicted events in nineteenth-century London.

Rebuilding became a national architectural moment: a public competition in 1835 drew nearly a hundred entries, and the commission chose Charles Barry's Gothic design, developed with the young architect Augustus Pugin, who later suffered a breakdown and died young. Barry's plan wove the surviving medieval structures into an enormous new complex of courtyards, staircases, and miles of corridors, built from limestone that soon began deteriorating in London's polluted air. Construction dragged on for decades, through a stonemasons' strike and rising costs that reached roughly £2.5 million, with the clock tower and Victoria Tower only finished by 1858 and 1860, shortly before Barry's death. The result cemented Gothic Revival as Britain's dominant architectural style and later earned the palace UNESCO World Heritage status, though in recent years officials have warned that the building is again in dire need of repair, plagued by flooding, asbestos, and fire risks reminiscent of its predecessor's fate.

Westminster Hall survived largely because of the firefighting decisions of one man, Superintendent James Braidwood of the London Fire Engine Establishment.

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