David Moore speaks of his photographs of the Commons in the context of ‘the intentions of the nineteenth-century explorer photographers, who were most often in the employ of the British state to survey the colonies, for a wide range of potentiality, from land campaigns to agricultural intentions, passage, etc’.11 It is apt, then, that just along the river lies a tunnel through which transported convicts were disgorged from another institution – the verminous Millbank prison whose site is now partly occupied by Tate Britain – en route for banishment to the colonies. These wide waters were the conduit for imperial conquest, for the export of the unwanted and the import of plunder. Down in the warehouses of the docklands wharves were piled high with elephant ivory and Asian opium, an imperial trade regulated and taxed from and for the tenants of the Palace of Westminster. And so this powerhouse would abide, a sense of enclosing patronage that marched in step with the industrial age. It is no coincidence that Westminster commenced construction around the same time of the Lunacy Act, which determined that every town in the land should have a place of asylum for its mentally-ill (indeed, Pugin’s contractor, the builder George Myers, was also responsible for the massive asylum at Friern Barnet). Thus, as the same time as Pugin and Barry’s edifice rose over central London, multiplying in cell-like division, so the vast Victorian lunatic asylums extended the philanthropy of democracy to the insane.

My own subsequent memories of Westminster are also rooted in a certain subversion. I was at college in London during the awakening of punk: my contact with Westminster then was a series of marches routed past its then still soot-blackened, pre-steam-cleaned faÁade, protesting on any number of issues, from the Anti-Nazi League to the bombing of Libiya, from the miners’ strike to the poll tax. All the while the Victorian complex stood as an architectural rebuttal to our democratic right to protest; an unyielding wall against which the Class War warriors could wage their civilian strife, creating, in the process, their own anti-governmental architecture: the turf mohican on place on the head of the statue of Winston Churchill; the attempt to sow fields of marijuana in the square around it; and up Whitehall their desecration of the cenotaph’s empty tomb with graffitti: these auguries of inner city anarchy which would be enacted for real in downtown Baghdad.

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