For this and more please visit http://www.lambethcollege.ac.uk
On 27 April students from the GNVQ Foundation Leisure and Tourism ESOL course visited the Palace of Westminster.
Apart from being extremely impressed by the sheer sumptuousness of the building, the students learnt some very interesting facts:
* What we think of as just the Houses of Parliament should, more accurately, be described as the Palace of Westminster - the title bequeathed to the current building completed in 1851. Before it burned down in 1834, the original building served the monarch as a residence - hence the Palace of Westminster.
* Because Henry VIII played tennis on one of the areas where he ‘held court’ in his palace in Westminster, the name for the space where one plays tennis has come known to us as a ‘court’.
* The area where MPs wait before going into the Chamber of the House of Commons is called The Lobby. From that we get the concept of a place for waiting before doing business and our verb for attempting to influence the political process.