St Stephen's Chapel and the Palace of Westminster. Edited by TimAyers, J.P.D.Cooper, Elizabeth HallamSmith, and CarolineShenton. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 2024. xxiv, 368pp. Hardback. £115.00. ISBN 9781837651634.

This is, we may assume, the final collection of essays to come out of the extraordinarily productive ‘St Stephen's Chapel’ project, based at the university of York, and the brain-child – as is true of so many projects based there over the past decades – of the late, and much-missed, Professor Mark Ormrod, to whom this tome is dedicated. And a tome it is indeed, bringing together no fewer than sixteen well-illustrated papers. The first half of the volume is concerned with the chapel's pre-parliamentary history, and may be dealt with here in brief. Mark Ormrod's posthumously published piece considers the place of St Stephen's chapel in the religious foundations of the kingship of the three Edwards; John Harper considers the chapel's evolution from the site of royal worship to a collegiate institution; and Elizabeth Biggs offers a broader history of the college of St Stephen from 1348 to the Reformation. But it is the chapel's architecture and the available archaeological evidence that is central to this collection. Appropriately, its introduction is followed by Tim Ayers’ substantial survey chapter, complemented by James Hillson's discussion of the role of iterative design at St Stephen's up to the sea change of 1348. Two further chapters, respectively authored by Paul Binski and Jane Spooner, are concerned with the imagery of the chapel and its iconography, with a particular focus on the surviving fragments. This first section of the book is rounded off by Magnus Williamson's consideration of late medieval polyphony in the context of the chapel of St Stephen. The dissolution of the collegiate churches by the government of the young Edward VI made the former chapel available as a permanent home for the house of commons. The Commons, who had previously gathered normally in the monks’ refectory at neighbouring Westminster abbey, had lost that meeting place in the final stages of the dissolution of the religious houses in the 1540s. The disbandment of the colleges less than a decade later made free a replacement that would go on to shape the lower house of the English parliament to the present day. The process of transition is the topic of John Cooper's piece, while Murray Tremellen discusses the transformation of the site by Sir Christopher Wren at the end of the 17th century, the most substantial such programme of works undertaken since the mid-16th century. The century that followed saw the Commons expand substantially, by virtue of the acts of union with first Scotland and subsequently Ireland. This necessitated the provision of additional seating in the already crowded house, and led to calls for the construction of a new, purpose-built set of chambers. The resultant debates are the subject of Paul Seward's contribution. Seaward sounds a comparative note, examining the various models put forward on the strength of continental, but also trans-Atlantic precedents. Nothing had been resolved when the great fire of 1834 rendered the matter more pressing, as Rosemary Hill's discussion of antiquarian interests and influences in the period before and immediately after the disaster demonstrates. Changes were made, but piecemeal, leading to an unsatisfactory situation where Lords and Commons alike met over decades in an effective building site. All this changed on the night of 16 October 1834 when much of the ancient palace of Westminster went, literally, up in smoke. The process by which the Lords and Commons were first put up in temporary accommodation, and subsequently provided for in far grander style in the new palace, is the subject of Rebekah Moore's chapter. It is left to Mark Collins to take the story across much of the 19th century to the bombing of the Commons during the Second World War, on the night of 10–11 May 1941; the move of the house to the lords; and the subsequent replacement of the lower chamber by Giles Gilbert Scott's design. Two final chapters round off the collection. Elizabeth Hallam-Smith, herself an expert on the fire of 1834, turns her attention to the last surviving part of the old St Stephen's, the chapel of St Mary Undercroft. She painstakingly traces its evolution over the full 500 years of the chapel's post-medieval existence to its present use, once more as a place of worship. The final piece in this collection is Caroline Shenton's and Melanie Unwin's consideration of St Stephen's Hall as a place of commemoration of the nation's history, and much else besides. It is here that we also catch a glimpse of that more recent addition to parliament, women using the hallowed space of St Stephen's Hall in their protracted campaign for suffrage. This is an informative, and in large parts erudite, rather than a controversial collection. Far from being just an afterthought to the project, there is much here that will be essential reading for anybody interested in the history of the English (or latterly, UK) parliament, and it is good to see it come to fruition, even a number of years after the conclusion of the project that begat it.