The church standing today is largely the work of Henry III, who began rebuilding the older Romanesque abbey in 1245 in the French Gothic style he had encountered on the continent, raising the nave to one of the tallest vaults in England. Later additions, including a Tudor Lady Chapel added by Henry VII around 1503 and a pair of west towers designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the eighteenth century, did not fundamentally alter that soaring, light-filled character. Before Henry's rebuilding, the site had been a working Benedictine monastery since at least the tenth century, refounded on a grander scale by Edward the Confessor in the eleventh, and it was this monastic community, not a cathedral chapter, that occupied the abbey until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII in 1540.
Rather than falling to ruin like most dissolved English monasteries, the church was refounded as a collegiate church governed by a Dean and Chapter and, from 1560, established permanently as a royal peculiar under Elizabeth I, a status it has held ever since. Today it forms part of a single UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1987 together with the Palace of Westminster and the adjoining Saint Margaret's Church, recognized as a coherent group of buildings central to English constitutional and religious history. The abbey remains an active church with daily worship and a resident community of clergy and choir, a working institution rather than a preserved monument, even as several million visitors pass through it each year.