Occupying more than a million square feet on the north bank of the River Thames, the House of Parliament has been the
seat of the British government since 1016. It has more than 1100 rooms, including both chambers of Parliament lawmakers’
officers, libraries and pubs. It is the home of archives and art chronicling the last millennium of British history. However, the estate, formally known as the Palace of Westminster, is in disrepair. Its façade looks sturdy from a distance, but up close it’s held
together only by the grime of decades. Staff members upstairs count getting trapped in elevators as an occupational hazard. Most
of the nearly 4000 bronze-framed windows don’t close properly, letting warm air out and cold rain in. The alarm system is so
unreliable that at least two wardens patrol the building looking for fires, day and night, all year round. Even the gilded chambers
where lawmakers sit aren’t immune to decay. In April, a debate in the House of Commons was cut short by water leaking from
the ceiling. That day, the upkeep team was lucky. On bad days, the leaks come instead from the 130-year-old sewage system. Lawmakers have known about the growing risk since the 1940s but have taken until now to act. In 2016, an official report
warned of a “substantial and growing risk [of a] single, catastrophic event.” But lawmakers didn’t vote to vacate the building
until 2018. Even then, they dragged their feet, with Brexit eating up parliamentary time.
It took a fire nearly destroying the 850-year-old Notre Dame cathedral in Paris in April, 2019, to instill a sense of urgency.
For Parisians, that blaze was so devastating because of Notre Dame’s central role in French literature, history and region. In the
British capital there is no equivalent place of worship; the House of Parliament are the closest any building comes to encasing in
stone the history and identity of the nation. On May 9, three weeks after the last embers in Paris were extinguished, U.K.
lawmakers voted to begin setting up an independent body to totally evacuate and refurbish Parliament.
As the Brexit crisis ramps up, the building is at a breaking point. On Aug. 28, 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson
announced plans to effectively lock lawmakers out of Parliament to potentially force a “no deal” Brexit on Oct. 31, despite
complaints that such a move would unconstitutional. And on Sept. 3, Johnson said he would try to call an early election after
lawmakers moved to thwart his plans. Amid the chaos, the bill to restore Parliament is under threat. “If we have a general election
and it doesn’t get through before, that would be a problem,” says Mark Tami, a lawmaker who sits on the restoration board. “We
would have to start all over again.”
The home of British democracy has burned before. In 1834, a cataphoric fire struck the old Parliament building, which
dated back to the 11th century. Almost all of the complex was destroyed. The building was soon rebuilt, bigger and grander than
before. But the seeds of today’s problems were sown during construction, when David Boswell Reid, a 19th century pioneer of
air-conditioning, was brought in to alter the designs. He added dozens of empty shafts, stretching from the basement to the roof,
and spanning each ceiling and floor above it. But the primitive air-conditioning system never really functioned properly. Later,
workers used these invisible spaces to conceal new pipes and wires; over the years, records of exactly what each did were lost.
New utilities were laid over defunct ones, and they were sprayed with carcinogenic asbestos during the 1950s when it was in
vogue as a fire suppressant.
According to Andy Piper, the design director for Parliament’s restoration program, much of the task of renovating
Parliament will be stripping and compartmentalizing these voids. Ironically, for the duration of the work, the danger of fire will
only be heightened. It’s not hard to imagine a spark from temporary electrical work setting the building alight. Notre Dame fires
began during restoration. Yet, the risks facing parliament are not limited to fire.
In 2018, a large chunk of stone fell from Victoria Tower, the tallest part of the palace, right onto the entrance to the House
of Lords. “If that had landed on somebody, it would have killed them instantly,” Piper says. After that, workers went around
with buckets, prodding at suspect stonework and removing loose masonry. Now, much of the building is covered in netting.
“The extreme potential for the building to kill people is becoming more obvious.”
Another problem is the arcane plumbing. On one occasion in 2016, the unfortunate occupants of one room all had to get
hepatitis shots after a pipe exploded, bringing the ceiling down in a rain of excrement.
Despite the risks, some lawmakers have long resisted efforts to evacuate. “There was this idea that if we leave here, we’re
never coming back,” Tami says. “I think that was particularly true for the members of the House of Lords,” He says of the upper
chamber of Parliament, where the average age is 70.
Even with plans now actually in place to vacate the palace, progress is still slow. On the current timeline, lawmakers and
their staff won’t move out until 2025 at the earliest, when the alternative chambers and officers across the road are finally finished.
The total cost of the restoration is expected to be around $5 billion. “It is quite a challenging deadline,” says Peach, the chair of the restoration board. When lawmakers do eventually go, she says, the work is expected to take an additional six to eight years,
meaning the palace stands to be out of action until well into the 2030s. Nobody knows how Britain will look at that point. “Right
now is not the ideal time,” Tami says of the need to evacuate Parliament amid Brexit, the biggest challenge Britain has faced in
generations.
There’s also a chance that the new Prime Minister could undo the plans to refurbish the building, consigning law makers
to remain in the Palace of Westminster as it falls apart around them. Caroline Shenton, author of The Day Parliament Burned
Down, a history of the 1834 blaze, is pessimistic. “Politicians’ attitudes today are as they were in the early 19th century,” she says,
casting her gaze back to the years before the 1834 blaze. “I don’t believe that history repeats itself. But human nature does.”
(Adapted from Time Magazine, September 16, 2019)
【題組】29. What does “compartmentalizing” in Paragraph 6 possibly mean?
(A) Mitigating. (B) Hoaxing. (C) Separating. (D) Slamming.
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