- Storm building - 5th November 2026
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With today marking the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot, our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry explains how major events like this, as well as devolution in Wales, can be explored through a little-undertaken exercise – examining some of the buildings involved.
It is often forgotten how important historical events can often be told in a different way – through its buildings.
The Gunpowder Plot was an intention to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on Tuesday 5 November 1605, as the prelude to a popular revolt in the Midlands during which King James’s nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was to have been installed as the new head of state. It failed, of course, and its failure is celebrated every year on this day.
But how many people can name the house in the Midlands where much of the plotting was done, and where some of the conspirators were caught or killed?
It is Holbeche House (also, in some texts, known as Holbeach or Holbeache), and there has been a huge row about its future.
The house was derelict and boarded up in 2022, with locals campaigning to try and open up the house for visitors and preserve the building.
Despite its importance, the house has been added to the Historic England Heritage At Risk Register.
Not as explosive, but in its own way just as significant was devolution (Tony Blair’s ‘big idea’!), which completely transformed the political identity of the UK.
The new building housing the Welsh Assembly (WA), now the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru (WP/SC) was extremely controversial, and this is largely unremembered.
The cost of it was an enormous bone of contention (ultimately £70 million), the original architect was sacked, and there were fierce debates about WHERE it should go, because Cardiff had voted against devolution in 1997. Aberystyth was even mooted at one point, before it was eventually decided that putting it here would make it difficult for almost EVERYBODY!
After construction started, the world-renowned architect Richard Rogers was fired because costs had spiralled. The media outlet ‘Building’ declared: “A big hole in the ground at Cardiff Bay marks the spot where the Welsh assembly building, the latest masterpiece from Richard Rogers Partnership, should be taking shape. But in July, Rogers was sacked from the project after Edwina Hart, the assembly’s finance minister, accused the practice of allowing costs to rocket from £26.6m to more than £40m in the space of a few months”.
Even after it was built, the WP/SC building has remained controversial; coming to symbolise for some the futility of devolution, while for others it is a magnificent addition to Cardiff’s skyline, and devolution itself is a right and proper ‘process not an event’.
WalesOnline (WO) has stated: “…the building became accepted. Its silhouette became a symbol of Wales and its capital city. A parliament quite unlike any other around the world… Its creator, Ivan Harbour, spoke to us about the anguish he went through dreaming up a concept fit for something that everyone hoped would become a symbol of a nation – which it has.
It’s not just in Wales or Staffordshire either that important stories can be told through buildings. Posh hotels can do too.
In a new book about Claridge’s Martin Williams, a historian, traces how the hotel has witnessed all manner of political and cultural shifts since 1812.
Princes and empresses slept there on visits to Britain; the future George IV, then prince regent, was thought to have slept there with lovers.
So don’t ignore the history of buildings. They can often tell a good story…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing decades long award-winning career in journalism (which included covering devolution, both for BBC Wales and BBC Newsnight), as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
Tomorrow – throughout that career, Phil has always tried to look beyond the obvious headlines, and while we have heard an enormous amount of how life may be made difficult for Donald Trump for the rest of his Presidency, there has been almost no news about the problems now facing the Democrats.
