Westminster Abbey: A Thousand Years of National Pageantry

Fifteen royal weddings and thirty-eight coronations - Westminster Abbey will be the venue for a sixteenth royal wedding, that of Kate Middleton and Prince William. In this superb book, Jenkyns weaves together with wit and charm the significance of this iconic building and its history. Westminster Abbey is the most complex church in the world in terms of its history, functions and memories - perhaps the most complex building of any kind. It has been an abbey and a cathedral and is now a collegiate church and a royal peculiar. It is the coronation church, a royal mausoleum, a Valhalla for the tombs of the great, a 'national cathedral' and the 'Tomb of the Unknown Warrior'. This new edition recounts the story of this iconic building and the role it plays in our national psyche.