I am here in the Parliamentary Archives with Caroline Shenton,

clerk of the records, to talk about an upcoming anniversary in the architectural history of Parliament.

Caroline, can you tell me when this anniversary is and what it marks?

Well, this is the anniversary of the Great Fire of Westminster,

the fire that burnt down the old houses of Parliament on the 16th of October 1834.

So there's the 175th anniversary of that event coming up later this month.

So the building we see today, that we know as the Houses of Parliament, is not the original building.

Can you tell us a bit about the original building that used to be on this site? It was a medieval palace which had grown up

over the centuries. Henry VIII moved out of the medieval palace in the 16th century and since that

point Parliament had been sitting in it. So it's actually a higgledy-piggledy mix of lots of

different buildings. Westminster Hall, of course, which is still standing today, was a big part of it.

But there was the old St Stephen's Chapel, which had been the Royal Chapel of the Royal Palace,

which had subsequently become the House of Commons Chamber. And there were various other previously royal apartments, which had subsequently become the House of Commons Chamber.

And there were various other previously royal apartments, which had successively been, the House of Lords and various other ceremonial bits of the palace.

So there was a file on the 16th of October 1834. Can you tell me a little bit about how it started?

As well as including the houses of Parliament,

the old Palace of Westminster included a number of government departments,

of which one was the Excheca, which had been the Finance Department of the medieval and early modern state.

The exchequer was abolished finally in 1826,

and in the buildings that it had vacated were a big pile

of what were known as tally sticks and tally sticks were notched wooden sticks which acted as a form

of receipt for government income and there were about two cartloads of these left over in the Exchequer offices.

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