Inside Westminster Abbey: The Coronation Chair, the Lady Chapel and the Chapter House

The most famous piece of furniture in the Abbey is a battered medieval chair. Edward I had it made around 1300 to hold the Stone of Scone, the stone Scottish kings were crowned on, which he had carried off from Scotland in 1296. Master Walter painted it with birds, foliage and animals on gilt, and almost every monarch since has been crowned sitting in it.

Look closely and you will see the damage. Westminster schoolboys and visitors carved their names into it in the 18th and 19th centuries, one of them boasting that he slept in the chair, and a suffragette bomb in 1914 broke off a corner.

The stone is no longer inside. Scottish nationalists took it on Christmas Day 1950, it was recovered the next year, and in 1996 it went back to Scotland. It is now kept at Perth Museum and comes back to Westminster for coronations. The empty chair stands in St George's Chapel at the west end of the nave, where visitors can see it.

Henry VII began it in 1503 and it was finished in 1516, several years after his death, probably by the master masons Robert Janyns and William Vertue. Its fan-vaulted ceiling, with carved stone pendants hanging from it, is the thing to look up at.

Around the walls stand some 95 statues of saints. Two show St Matthew wearing spectacles, and one is St Wilgefort, the bearded woman saint. Below them, the carved wooden stalls belong to the Knights of the Order of the Bath, installed here since 1725, and the bright banners overhead are those of living knights.

Hugh Easton's RAF window of 1947 carries the badges of the fighter squadrons of the Battle of Britain. The chapel is also full of royal tombs, from Henry VII's own to those of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots in the side aisles.

The monks met every day in the Chapter House, an octagon built between 1246 and 1255 with a single central pillar fanning out into the vault. Up to eighty of them sat around the walls to pray, hear the Rule of St Benedict read and deal with the abbey's business. In 1257 the King's Great Council met here, and in the 14th century so did the House of Commons.

The medieval tiled floor survives, with an inscription comparing the room to the rose: the flower of flowers, the house of houses. Wall paintings of the Apocalypse and a Last Judgement of about 1390 cover the arches, and the door on the way in is claimed to be the oldest in Britain, dating from the 1050s.

Next door, off the East Cloister, is the Pyx Chamber, built around 1070 and one of the oldest surviving parts of the Abbey. It was a royal treasury and later held the Exchequer's records, and its name comes from the Trial of the Pyx, the test of the coinage. The stone table used for it is still there, seen from a viewing platform at the entrance.