The Memory of Parliament

What is it like to wander around the secret hallways and lost corridors of the Palace of Westminster? Rich Bunn takes you behind the gatekeepers and high tech security measures to show you the Parliament that almost no one sees.

Transcript

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The memory of Parliament When I worked at the Houses of Parliament, one of my favourite things to do was explore. To wander off the main track, the bit that's bustling with MPs and clerks, and just go into the corners and corridors and basements and towers. Parliament is a fabulous place with mysterious secrets, incredible architecture and dark corners and labyrinthian structure, and it's spread over many floors, and it has all kinds of crazy areas that people seem to have forgotten. This is Unseen Parliament. Stories from inside the Palace of Westminster. I'm Rich Bunn. I remember once stepping into a room that had boxes of crumpled leaflets that had been stuffed through the gratings by suffragettes a hundred years ago and just collected up. I found the room where they stored all of the ink wells that Parliament had long since stopped using. I found the offices of Sinn Fein, who of course don't take their seats and yet still have offices, as is their right as elected MPs. So you have these rooms that are preserved, and they have old copies of the News of the World and the Sun on the desk and yellow typewritten pages tacked onto the walls and huge crystal astrays on the table. Part of the reason that the Palace of Westminster, I think, has been allowed to get like this is because it is falling apart. So because bits were damaged in the Blitz, because bits are a thousand years old and they've lost the plans, because bits have flooded steadily over the hundreds of years, those bits have been abandoned and just sort of built around or built over. And also there's this obsession with never interrupting the business of the chamber, which means that places like the basements have chronological layers of redundant technology where they've done a quick switch rather than strip everything out. It's particularly notable if you go to the areas that are dedicated to telecommunications, because you have fiber optic broadband, and then underneath that you have copper cabling, and then underneath that you have early telephone wires. It's all laid over by decades of dust and probably mice poo, and you find little rooms that have just got mop buckets in it, but they're called things like the Victuela's lodgings. Anyway, once when I was in Victoria Tower, and Victoria Tower is the mirror tower of what most people call Big Ben, but what parliamentary aficionados will know is actually called Elizabeth Tower, with Big Ben being the name of the Bell rather than the tower. On the opposite side to Elizabeth Tower is a slightly slightly smaller mirror version called Victoria Tower, and at the time it was the home of the parliamentary archives. Which again is just this astonishing concept that when any law is passed in Great Britain, it is printed onto vellum, onto animal parchment, and stored in a big roll in Victoria Tower. And at the time that I went there, it was a very quiet and unloved place, destined soon for digitization and with one rickety old lift and a few clerks and archivists shuffling around it. And I went up to one of the highest rooms and it was a plant room. And I'm smiling as I say that, and you'll realise why in a second, but of course what I mean is a room with generators and equipment in it. It was dark and warm and wet, and as I stepped inside it I saw the largest mushrooms I have ever seen in my life, and the room was full. Of course I'm sure that the engineers and the maintenance staff knew they were there, but no one bureaucratic had been told of their existence, so they'd just been allowed to grow there, and I thought that was amazing, weird and fat and beautiful as they were. But the bit that was enchanting and a little bit eerie was that I had quite literally just heard a documentary on the radio talking about how fungi have a sort of memory, that the root structure beneath is the real brain, because these mycelium do mirror neural networks and actually have a memory, have an ability to alter their developmental patterns based on their interactions. And I remember just thinking that it was so wonderful that these mushrooms were growing in the archives of the Parliamentary Records Tower. And I couldn't help but wonder what the fungi of Parliament remembered. Thanks so much for listening through to the end. I'm Rich Bunn, and if you've enjoyed this podcast, please think about subscribing or sharing with a friend. They're published every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye.