Secret Passage Discovered in London’s House of Commons

LONDON, ENGLAND—According to a BBC News report, conservators uncovered a 360-year-old passageway in the House of Commons that was closed off during the Victorian era, briefly opened in the 1950s, and then sealed off and forgotten behind thick masonry and wooden paneling. Evidence for a door accessing the passageway was discovered in building plans among some 10,000 uncatalogued documents. “As we looked at the paneling closely, we realized there was a tiny brass key-hole that no one had really noticed before, believing it might just be an electricity cupboard,” said historic consultant Elizabeth Hallam Smith. The passageway was created for the coronation of Charles II in 1660, so that guests could access Westminster Hall, which is located next door. “It is the way that the Speaker’s procession would have come, on its way to the House of Commons, as well as many MPs over the centuries, so it’s a hugely historic space,” she explained. Once the door was opened, the researchers found a stone floor, the hinges for the original wooden doors that opened into Westminster Hall, nineteenth-century graffiti left behind by the workers who enclosed the space, and an electric light switch that was probably installed in the 1950s. To read about evidence for residual hysteria following the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an attempt to blow up Parliament, go to "Treason, Plot, and Witchcraft."