Tony Willoughby

Westminster Abbey - a tour of the Nave with a difference Tony Willoughby

Westminster Abbey is primarily a working church and is set up as such; not as a museum. Yet the majority of visitors are not worshippers. They are there to wonder at the magnificence of the building and its history as told by the artefacts on display (e.g. the Coronation Chair) and the plethora of monuments and graves of those memorialised and/or buried there. Unlike a museum, few points of interest are identified by way of labels and, necessarily, only a very small minority of them can be included in a conveniently sized guidebook.

There are over 3,000 people known to have been buried in the Abbey. There are stories behind many of them. This little book concentrates on some of those in the Nave and stories unlikely to be found in the usual guidebooks.