Parliament House — The Palace of Westminster

Description

There is a reason the Palace of Westminster is the most sketched, painted, and photographed building in Britain. Its silhouette is democracy itself — a building so loaded with meaning that even people who have never visited London recognise it instantly.

This engraving captures the Palace in forensic detail. The intricate Gothic Revival stonework. The rows of pointed arches. The towers and turrets that Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin designed to make the seat of British government look as though it had stood for a thousand years — even though it was built in the 1840s.

On Thames slate, the illusion is complete. The dark, ancient stone and the white-engraved Victorian Gothic merge seamlessly, as though the building really had been carved from the riverbed. It is, perhaps, the most Memoza piece in the entire collection — architecture and geology, history and craft, meeting in a single object you can hold.