Westminster

Westminster is an area of Central London, component of a wider City of Westminster.

The area, which extends from a River Thames to Oxford Street has numerous visitor attractions in addition to historic landmarks, including the Palace of Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral & much of the West End shopping and entertainment district.

The name abbey church and royal peculiar of St Peter's Westminster Abbey, west of the City of London until the English Reformation there was also an Eastminster, near the Tower of London, in the East End of London. The abbey's origins date from between the 7th and 10th centuries, but it rose to national prominence when rebuilt by Edward the Confessor in the 11th. It has been the home of England's government since approximately 1200, and from 1707 the Government of the United Kingdom. In 1539 it became a city.

Westminster often forwarded to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, in the Palace of Westminster.

Wider uses of the term

Thus "Westminster", with its focus in public life from early history, is casually used as a metonym for Parliament and the political community of the United Kingdom generally. The civil proceeds is similarly noted to by the northern sub-neighbourhood it inhabits, "Whitehall". "Westminster" is consequently also used in source to the Westminster system, the parliamentary benefit example of democratic government that has evolved in the United Kingdom and for those other nations, particularly in the Commonwealth of Nations and other parts of the former British Empire that adopted it.

The term "Westminster Village", sometimes used in the context of British politics, does not refer to a geographical area at all; employed especially in the phrase "Westminster Village gossip", it denotes a supposedlysocial circle of members of parliament, political journalists, requested spin doctors and others connected to events in the Palace of Westminster and Government ministries.