The Victorian Palace of Science

Edward J. Gillin completed a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in 2015 and is now a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He specialises in British science, technology, architecture, and politics in the nineteenth century, with his current work focusing on the role of sound in the production of Victorian scientific knowledge. Previous works cover topics such as the Cunard Steamship Company, early-twentieth-century political protest, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern steamship. He received the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain's Hawksmoor Medal, and in 2016 was awarded the Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology.

• Introduction; 1. A radical building: the science of politics and the new Palace of Westminster; 2. Architecture and knowledge: Charles Barry and the world of mid-nineteenth-century science; 3. 'The Science of Architecture': making geological knowledge for the Houses of Parliament; 4. Chemistry in the Commons: Edinburgh science and David Boswell Reid's ventilating of Parliament, 1834–1854; 5. Enlightening Parliament: the Bude Light in the House of Commons and the illumination of politics; 6. Order in Parliament: George Biddell Airy and the construction of time at Westminster; Conclusion: the house of experiment.

'This is in an important intervention in architectural history, and a successful challenge to histories of the Palace of Westminster, and architectural histories more generally, that are preoccupied with aesthetics and style. It is also a significant contribution to the history of science, not just because of the new story it tells, but in the way it expands on the work of Joe Bord to show how contested notions of science permeated governing approaches during the age of reform.' Martin Spychal, Parliamentary History