Westminster Abbey audio guide,
five stops, free.

Take in the whole of this front: it is the face of Henry the Third's church, not the one on the postcards. The two towers at the west end came five hundred years later. This transept, with the great round window at the top, belongs to the church begun on the sixth of July 1245, when Henry pulled down the eastern half of Edward the Confessor's abbey and started again in the newest French style.

His masons borrowed from Reims, Amiens and Chartres: pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, rose windows. Nobody knows whether his first master mason, Henry of Reynes, was English or French. And the arm of the church you are facing was built unusually long for a practical reason: a coronation needs seats, and the transepts were designed to hold as many guests as possible.

Now read the front from the bottom up. Three porches. Long before the carving you see now, the medieval front earned a nickname, Solomon's Porch, after the temple in Jerusalem; what faces you today is its Victorian rebuilding. In the arch over the central door, Christ in Majesty blesses the Church and the World with angels around him. Below him sit the Apostles, and under them walks a procession of professions, music, painting, sculpture, law, history, engineering, alongside the kings who built this place. On the pillar between the doors, the Virgin holds the crowned Christ.

Now the lowest niches either side of the doors. They are empty. George Gilbert Scott designed statues for them and they were never made. The little carved dragons that were meant to hold them up are still there, holding up nothing, and above them gargoyles spit rainwater out of drainpipes in their mouths.

Very little of the surface is medieval. The original Reigate stone weathered badly and London's coal smoke did the rest. Christopher Wren and his assistant William Dickinson worked on this front, Scott designed the triple porch, and John Loughborough Pearson altered the upper front and the stone of the rose window. The glass inside it was designed by James Thornhill and made in 1722: Christ and the Apostles, without Judas. When Pearson restored it, the figures lost their feet. At the peak of the porch gable, Saint Peter tramples the devil.

One last thing before you go in. On the eleventh of November 1920 a gun carriage came to this door with the King walking behind it, and the choir came out into this north porch to meet a coffin. It was the Unknown Warrior's, and his grave is where this walk ends.

Before the tomb, look up. You are standing in the north aisle of the chapel Henry the Seventh built at the eastern end of the Abbey, begun in 1503 and consecrated in 1516, and the ceiling over your head is what people come for. It is a fan vault, stone ribs spreading like opened fans, and this chapel was the first anywhere to hang pendants from one. Each pendant is a single stone wedged into an arch you can only half see. John Leland called it the wonder of the world. Francis Bacon said the king dwelled more richly dead in his tomb than he ever did alive in any of his palaces.

Now the tomb at the end of the aisle. Ten black columns hold up a canopy, the lion and the dragon of the royal arms stand at its corners, and underneath lies Elizabeth the First in white marble, her head on two cushions and a lion at her feet. The face was modelled on portraits of her in old age. James the First paid for it, the sculptor was Maximilian Colt, and Jan de Critz painted it: a drawing made between 1618 and 1620 and found in Germany shows her in a crimson robe lined with ermine, with a blue orb and colour in her cheeks. None of that paint survives, and the crown, orb and sceptre she holds now are modern replacements, the originals stolen centuries ago.

The surprise: she is not alone. Her coffin was first put in her grandfather's vault in 1603, then moved in 1606 into the vault beneath this monument and laid on top of the coffin of her half-sister, Mary the First. The Protestant queen lies on top of the Catholic one. The Latin on the base reads: partners in throne and grave, here we sleep, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters in hope of the Resurrection.

And James was making a point. Across the chapel, in the south aisle, he built a second monument, taller than this one, for his own mother: Mary, Queen of Scots, whose execution is one of the things Elizabeth's reign is remembered for. So the queen Elizabeth had executed got the taller tomb.

At her funeral, on the twenty-eighth of April 1603, the crowds made, as it was recorded, such a general sighing, groaning and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man.

Before you leave, look at the side windows beside you, leaded in little diamond-shaped panes. Only a few fragments of the chapel's first glass survive anywhere in it. The rest was smashed in Oliver Cromwell's time, and most of what was left was blown out by bombs in the Second World War.

Stop before you reach the black stone ringed with red poppies. It is the one grave in the Abbey that nobody walks on.

The idea began in a back garden at Armentières in 1916, where an army chaplain, the Reverend David Railton, saw a grave with a rough cross and four pencilled words: An Unknown British Soldier. In August 1920 he wrote to the Dean of Westminster, Herbert Ryle, and within three months it had been done. Bodies of unidentified British servicemen were taken from four battle areas, the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres, and a brigadier who did not know which had come from where chose one. He could have served in the army, the navy or the air force, and come from anywhere in the British Isles or the Empire. That is why the stone says warrior, not soldier.

The coffin was made of oak two inches thick from a tree in the garden at Hampton Court, with a sixteenth-century sword set into its iron bands. The destroyer HMS Verdun carried it to Dover, and her bell hangs near the grave. On the eleventh of November 1920 it came in through the north door you came in by and was carried here, through about a thousand mourners and a guard of honour of a hundred holders of the Victoria Cross. The guests of honour were about a hundred women, each of whom had lost her husband and all her sons. King George the Fifth dropped a handful of French earth onto the coffin from a silver shell, and a week later the grave was filled with a hundred sandbags of soil from the battlefields.

The slab is black marble from a quarry near Namur in Belgium, and the letters, composed by Dean Ryle, were made with brass from melted-down wartime ammunition. Read the last line: they buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house. Look for the American Medal of Honor on a pillar close by. In 1923 Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon laid her wedding bouquet here for a brother killed at Loos, and royal brides have had their bouquets laid on this stone ever since.

A few steps away, in St George's Chapel at this west end of the nave, stands the Coronation Chair: two metres and five centimetres of oak made for Edward the First in 1300 and 1301 to hold the Stone of Scone, and used at coronations since 1308. Look at its back. Westminster schoolboys and tourists carved their names into it for two centuries, and one of them recorded on the seat that P. Abbott slept in this chair on the fifth and sixth of July 1800. A bomb in 1914, thought to be the work of suffragettes, knocked off a corner. The stone was stolen on Christmas Day 1950 and recovered in April 1951; it was returned to Scotland in 1996 and came back to the chair for the coronation of King Charles the Third in 2023. The rest of the time the chair stands empty.

Before you walk out of the Great West Door, look back up the nave. Henry the Third died in 1272 with this end unbuilt. Henry Yevele carried on in 1376 in the old style, a hundred years out of date, and the vault over you, thirty-one metres up, was only finished in 1517.