These two volumes are to differing extents fruit of Warwick Rodwell's ongoing engagement with Westminster Abbey. One deals with a justly celebrated structure, the other with an element – ‘the stumpy little tower at the crossing’, in the dean of Westminster's words – that is often overlooked, and has never before received such detailed attention. Each has its own appeal. The book on the chapter house, which arose out of a symposium held at the abbey in 2008, is a roundly successful attempt to examine its subject comprehensively, with essays on its design, structure, embellishment (polychromy, tiling, glazing) and the history of its meaning and use down to the nineteenth-century restoration under George Gilbert Scott. Contributors have been carefully chosen for their specialist knowledge of Westminster, and include, besides Rodwell himself (who wrote two essays), Paul Binski, David Carpenter, Tim Tatton-Brown, Pamela Tudor-Craig and Christopher Wilson. The content of the essays is correspondingly well-informed and interesting. Rodwell's first essay, on the morphology and construction of the chapter house, is particularly interesting for what it has to say about the building's little-studied undercroft, which occurs in medieval records as a treasury, and the constructional sequence of the whole. Wilson's chapter on the architecture analyses its relationship to French sources and the effect it exerted on English Gothic in the later thirteenth century. Tudor-Craig and Richard Foster review the evidence for the sculpture of the chapter-house portals, while Binski and Helen Howard discuss the wall-paintings within the structure: the relationship between the beasts painted beneath the Apocalypse and the bestiary images exemplified in CUL, ms Gg 6.5 is an interesting and convincing revelation. Jeremy Ashbee presents a document-based analysis of the chapter house's function as a royal treasury, Elizabeth Hallam Smith an overview of its use as the record office of the Exchequer, and Steven Brindle provides an exemplary account of Scott's transformative mid nineteenth-century restoration, which, as a number of the contributors point out, went too far in some respects, and deserves even now to be modified, if only by removal of the stylistically incongruous and iconographically ludicrous Christ in Majesty intruded into the quatrefoil of the inner portal. Alongside all of this, the slim volume on the lantern tower may appear at a disadvantage. However, its subject is approached in the same well-rounded way, through a combination of archaeological, documentary and antiquarian evidence. Rodwell concludes that Henry iii and his architect originally envisaged an octagonal crossing tower that would correspond visually and spatially with the chapter house and various other elements of the complex. (There is some evidence for this in a drawing in Abbot Islip's mortuary roll.) Amiens Cathedral is invoked as a comparison (although it is admitted that we do not know what form the crossing tower or flèche at that building originally took). One need only look at the girth of the crossing piers at Westminster to realise that the enthusiastic antiquarian reconstructions positing a monumental steeple of the Salisbury type were in fact never envisioned. Sir Christopher Wren did propose something of the sort in the early eighteenth century, but, mercifully, this was never carried out: ditto a number of other mooted schemes. What is visible today is largely the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor, modified in some respects (and inevitably) by Scott and renovated after the Blitz. Rodwell communicates with great success the interest of the crossing tower's history. Its enduring status as unfinished business has left a large visual record that renders its modern existence as interesting as its medieval.