The Cosmati Pavement At Westminster Abbey

I'm Vanessa Simeone and I'm Head Conservator at Westminster Abbey. The Kosmati Pavement is a medieval mosaic pavement at the heart of Westminster Abbey in front of the High Altar. The Kosmati Pavement plays a really big role in coronations. For over 700 years this has been the setting of the Coronation Theatre. This is where the coronation chair is placed and it's where the crowning takes place. It was laid in 1268 and the design and technique is of Italian origins. The pavement is pretty significant. It's unique in Britain. There isn't another pavement like this. Workmen came over from Italy and they collaborated with British carvers to produce this beautiful mosaic. This pavement is astonishing. There are actually over 93,000 elements in it. The materials that have been used are a combination of English stones and stones brought over from Rome. We have purple and green porphyries. These are two stones that you always see in Kosmati Pavements but in our pavement, in this very English pavement, you see Purbeck marble, which is a very traditional medieval stone. If you look around the Abbey you'll see Purbeck marble everywhere. It's something quite unique in Kosmati Pavements. Because of the pavement's history, it has to be cared for delicately. The way that the pavement is treated now is very different to how it's been treated during history. We now know how to care properly for historic surfaces. We also know how to properly conserve them. The pavement underwent a conservation programme back in 2008 to 10. During the conservation programme there were a whole variety of different techniques and materials that we used to conserve and restore the pavement. The cleaning materials, we used solvents in a kind of face pack to remove all the wax and polish that had built up over the pavement over hundreds of years. We removed cement and that involved using chisels and grinders. We reintroduced mosaic and that involved cutting all the stones and bedding them back down into lime water and then finally we waxed the pavement so that we could bring back some of the colours in the pavement, saturate the different stones so that they shone and were quite colourful. The pavement you see today is maintained on a weekly basis. The whole of the area is vacuumed once or twice a week and then the pavement is buffed in preparation for the surfaces that happen on Thursday and Friday. Despite being over 700 years old, it might surprise some people to know that this pavement is used every day and is in fantastic condition. We conserved it so that it could be a working floor surface and that's what it is.