Bombed But Not Broken - House of Commons

By 1945, the House of Commons Chamber lay in ruins. It had been destroyed four years earlier, on the worst night of the London Blitz. On the anniversary of that attack BBC Parliament is screening Bombed But Not Broken [2011] in which Mark D’Arcy tells the story of the bombing and subsequent rebuilding of the Chamber. When MPs debated the reconstruction Sir Winston Churchill declared: “We shape our buildings – and our buildings shape us.” His intervention helped ensure the new Commons retained its traditional two-sided layout, rather than switching to a continental-style hemicycle. Speaking against the background of recent European history, Churchill was dismissive of the way other parliaments with their “harangues from the rostrum” had fallen to fascists and communists.