Statue of Margaret Thatcher (Palace of Westminster)

The Members' Lobby is a hallway in the Palace of Westminster used by members of the House of Commons, the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Members of Parliament may congregate here for discussions while not dealing with other business. The Lobby is situated immediately south of the Commons Chamber, close to the Central Lobby, and is off-limits to members of the public during voting sessions. It hosts offices of government and opposition whips, who are responsible for organising voting along party lines. Former British prime ministers are honoured with statues and busts in the Lobby. The monuments include: Four bronze statues, located next to the main doors at either end of the Lobby, portraying David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. Three stone statues, located next to the side doors, portraying Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour and H. H. Asquith. The fourth plinth in the set stands empty. Twelve bronze busts around the walls at the southern end, of Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Bonar Law, Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan and John Major. The bronze statue of Thatcher was unveiled in February 2007, and placed close to the bust of her Conservative predecessor Edward Heath. The sculptures of Heath, Thatcher and James Callaghan were added sooner after their premierships than those of previous prime ministers, following a change in the rules on depiction in Parliament so as to allow representation within a person's lifetime, instead of at least 10 years after their death as was previously the case. Following the inclusion of Thatcher, the Commons Works of Art Committee subsequently pursued a special project to commemorate all Prime Ministers to hold office since 1902, searching for monuments to the three who still had yet to be recognised: Cambell-Bannerman, Law and Chamberlain. This project was successfully completed after the addition of a bust of her successor, John Major. A bust of Tony Blair has been approved by the Commons’ Works of Art Committee but no sculptor has yet been chosen. The Committee has also discussed plans for portraits of Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg.The Members' Lobby was restored after its destruction during The Blitz in World War II, as attested by the monogram of King George VI on its doors. The bomb-damaged arch at the entrance to the Commons was retained as a reminder of 10–11 May 1941; it is now known as the "Churchill Arch". The feet of Oscar Nemon's bronze statue of Winston Churchill, as well as that of David Lloyd George, which flank the Commons doors, have been eroded, apparently by generations of MPs rubbing them for luck.

The statue of Winston Churchill is a standing bronze statue of statesman and writer Winston Churchill, situated in the Members' Lobby of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, part of the Palace of Westminster complex in Westminster, Central London. Churchill is depicted mid-stride, with his hands on his hips.Churchill and Nemon first met in Marrakech in 1951, where Nemon sculpted a terracotta bust that Churchill's wife, Lady Clementine Churchill said "represents to me my husband as I see him and as I think of him". In 1952, on Churchill's recommendation, Nemon made a bust of him at the request of Elizabeth II for Windsor Castle. Nemon also made a seated bronze sculpture of Churchill for the City of London's Guildhall, which Churchill described as a 'very good likeness' upon its unveiling in 1955.

The House of Commons of England was the lower house of the Parliament of England (which incorporated Wales) from its development in the 14th century to the union of England and Scotland in 1707, when it was replaced by the House of Commons of Great Britain. In 1801, with the union of Great Britain and Ireland, that house was in turn replaced by the House of Commons of the United Kingdom.

The House of Commons of Great Britain was the lower house of the Parliament of Great Britain between 1707 and 1801. In 1707, as a result of the Acts of Union of that year, it replaced the House of Commons of England and the third estate of the Parliament of Scotland, as one of the most significant changes brought about by the Union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain. In the course of the 18th century, the office of Prime Minister developed. The notion that a government remains in power only as long as it retains the support of Parliament also evolved, leading to the first ever motion of no confidence, when Lord North's government failed to end the American Revolution. The modern notion that only the support of the House of Commons is necessary for a government to survive, however, was of later development. Similarly, the custom that the Prime Minister is always a Member of the Lower House, rather than the Upper one, did not evolve until the twentieth century. The business of the house was controlled by an elected Speaker. The Speaker's official role was to moderate debate, make rulings on procedure, announce the results of votes, and the like. The Speaker decided who may speak and had the powers to discipline members who break the procedures of the house. The Speaker often also represented the body in person, as the voice of the body in ceremonial and some other situations. The title was first recorded in 1377 to describe the role of Thomas de Hungerford in the Parliament of England. By convention, Speakers are normally addressed in Parliament as Mister Speaker, if a man, or Madam Speaker, if a woman. In 1801, the House was enlarged to become the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, as a result of the Act of Union of 1800 which combined Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

The House of Commons is the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the upper house, the House of Lords, it meets in the Palace of Westminster located in London, England. The House of Commons is an elected body consisting of 650 members known as members of Parliament (MPs). MPs are elected to represent constituencies by the first-past-the-post system and hold their seats until Parliament is dissolved. The House of Commons of England started to evolve in the 13th and 14th centuries. In 1707 it became the House of Commons of Great Britain after the political union with Scotland. It assumed the title of "House of Commons of Great Britain and Ireland" after the political union with Ireland at the start of the 19th century. From 1800, the "United Kingdom" referred to was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and in 1922 became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after the independence of the Irish Free State. Accordingly, the House of Commons assumed its current title. Under the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, the Lords' power to reject legislation was reduced to a delaying power. The government is solely responsible to the House of Commons and the prime minister stays in office only as long as they retain the confidence of a majority of the Commons.

The 1906 WSPU march on 19 February 1906 was the first march held in London to demand the right to vote for women in the United Kingdom. Organized by Sylvia Pankhurst and Annie Kenney of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the event saw around 300–400 women march through central London to the House of Commons. It was held to coincide with the King's Speech and the opening of Parliament.Two hundred women from Bow, Bromley, Canning Town and Poplar in the East End marched to Caxton Hall, near the Commons, from St James's Park tube station. There, Emmeline Pankhurst heard there was no mention of votes for women in the King's Speech and led the women on another march to the Commons Strangers' Entrance. Over the following two hours, the women were allowed to enter in groups of 20 to lobby their MPs. The Daily Mirror reported the event on page 5: "Voteless Women. 3,000 [sic] Demonstrators March Behind a Red Banner. Smiling but Earnest."Emmeline Pankhurst saw the march as the beginning of a militant women's suffrage movement. The women "were awake at last", she wrote. "They were prepared to do something that women had never done before—fight for themselves. Women had always fought for men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own human rights. Our militant movement was established."

The Chapel of St Mary Undercroft is a Church of England chapel located in the Palace of Westminster, London, England. It had been a crypt below St Stephen's Chapel and had fallen into disuse, being used at various times as a wine cellar, dining room for Speakers (who had holes bored into the wall to accommodate two kitchen chimneys) and (now unconfirmed by records) stables for Oliver Cromwell's horses.After a fire had destroyed St Stephen's Chapel in 1834, the undercroft returned to its former use as a place of worship. Although much stonework was damaged in the fire, it was decorated in the 1860s by Edward Middleton Barry with gilded, painted and stenciled designs in rich colours to cover the walls, floor and vaulting. The backdrop of the altar depicts royal British saints. On the census night of 2 April 1911, suffragette Emily Davison hid in a cupboard overnight in the Chapel in order to be entered on the census form for the building as a way of ensuring her address was recorded as the House of Commons. A commemorative plaque, unveiled by Tony Benn in 1999, is fixed to the cupboard.It is still used for worship today. In particular, children of peers, who possess the title of "The Honourable", have the privilege of being able to use it as a wedding venue. In addition, members of Parliament and peers have the right to use the chapel as a place of christening in the baptistery and font (whose basin was made from a single slab of alabaster) designed by Barry.It is a Royal Peculiar chapel – outside the responsibility of any diocesan bishop. The building is administered through the Lord Great Chamberlain and Black Rod and it has no dedicated clergy: by convention services were conducted by the Rector of St Margaret's, Westminster, a member of the Chapter of Westminster Abbey. In 2010 the Speaker of the House of Commons used his right of appointment to nominate an outsider, Rev'd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, as the Speaker's Chaplain. The body of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was kept in St Mary Undercroft on the night before her funeral in April 2013. The honour was also accorded for the body of Tony Benn, the long-serving Labour politician, before his funeral in March 2014, as well as that of PC Keith Palmer who was fatally stabbed carrying out his duties on the palace grounds during the 2017 Westminster attack.

The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It alone possesses legislative supremacy and thereby ultimate power over all other political bodies in the UK and the overseas territories. Parliament is bicameral but has three parts, consisting of the sovereign (Crown-in-Parliament), the House of Lords, and the House of Commons (the primary chamber). Both houses of Parliament meet in separate chambers at the Palace of Westminster in the City of Westminster, one of the inner boroughs of the capital city, London. The House of Lords includes two different types of members: the Lords Spiritual, consisting of the most senior bishops of the Church of England; and the Lords Temporal, consisting mainly of life peers, appointed by the sovereign, and of 92 hereditary peers, sitting either by virtue of holding a royal office, or by being elected by their fellow hereditary peers. Prior to the opening of the Supreme Court in October 2009, the House of Lords also performed a judicial role through the Law Lords. The House of Commons is an elected chamber with elections to 650 single-member constituencies held at least every five years under the first-past-the-post system. By constitutional convention, all government ministers, including prime minister, are members of the House of Commons or, less commonly, the House of Lords and are thereby accountable to the respective branches of the legislature. Most cabinet ministers are from the Commons, whilst junior ministers can be from either house. With the global expansion of the British Empire, the UK Parliament has shaped the political systems of many countries as ex-colonies and so it has been called the "Mother of Parliaments".In theory, the UK's supreme legislative power is officially vested in the Crown-in-Parliament. However, the Crown normally acts on the advice of the prime minister, and the powers of the House of Lords are limited to only delaying legislation; thus power is de facto vested in the House of Commons.

The Visitors' Gallery, formally known as the Strangers' Gallery, is set aside for members of the public at the British House of Commons, and is intended for both invited and uninvited members of the public to watch the proceedings of the House. A similar gallery exists in the House of Lords. Members of the public may obtain tickets from their Member of Parliament. It is possible to queue outside St Stephen's Tower and be admitted to the gallery without booking, especially on Fridays, however during popular debates it will be nearly impossible to obtain a place without booking. The name refers to the traditional use of the term strangers to refer to those present in Parliament that are neither members nor staff. The gallery of the House of Commons is located on a level above the floor of the Commons chamber and looks down on it. There is a recently introduced glass screen at the front of the gallery to prevent the throwing of objects into the chamber. The glass screen was installed in April 2004 at the cost of £600,000.Other parliaments throughout the Commonwealth have similar facilities, which are known by the same terms.

St Stephen's Chapel, sometimes called the Royal Chapel of St Stephen, was a chapel in the old Palace of Westminster which served as the chamber of the House of Commons of England and that of Great Britain from 1547 to 1834. It was largely destroyed in the fire of 1834, but the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the crypt survived. The present-day St Stephen's Hall and its porch, which are within the new Palace of Westminster built in the 19th century, stand on exactly the same site and are today accessed through the St Stephen's Entrance, the public entrance of the House of Commons.

The Parliament of Great Britain was formed in May 1707 following the ratification of the Acts of Union by both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland. The Acts ratified the treaty of Union which created a new unified Kingdom of Great Britain and created the parliament of Great Britain located in the former home of the English parliament in the Palace of Westminster, near the City of London. This lasted nearly a century, until the Acts of Union 1800 merged the separate British and Irish Parliaments into a single Parliament of the United Kingdom with effect from 1 January 1801.

The Palace of Westminster, the medieval royal palace used as the home of the British parliament, was largely destroyed by fire on 16 October 1834. The blaze was caused by the burning of small wooden tally sticks which had been used as part of the accounting procedures of the Exchequer until 1826. The sticks were disposed of carelessly in the two furnaces under the House of Lords, which caused a chimney fire in the two flues that ran under the floor of the Lords' chamber and up through the walls. The resulting fire spread rapidly throughout the complex and developed into the largest conflagration in London between the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz of the Second World War; the event attracted large crowds which included several artists who provided pictorial records of the event. The fire lasted for most of the night and destroyed a large part of the palace, including the converted St Stephen's Chapel—the meeting place of the House of Commons—the Lords Chamber, the Painted Chamber and the official residences of the Speaker and the Clerk of the House of Commons. The actions of Superintendent James Braidwood of the London Fire Engine Establishment ensured that Westminster Hall and a few other parts of the old Houses of Parliament survived the blaze. In 1836 a competition for designs for a new palace was won by Charles Barry. Barry's plans, developed in collaboration with Augustus Pugin, incorporated the surviving buildings into the new complex. The competition established Gothic Revival as the predominant national architectural style and the palace has since been categorised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, of outstanding universal value.