about 200 people, and comprised a total of 1,180 rooms, 126 staircases and of corridors. Between 1836 and 1837 Pugin made more detailed drawings on which estimates were made for the palace's completion; reports of the cost estimates vary from £707,000 to £725,000, with six years until completion of the project. In June 1838 Barry and colleagues undertook a tour of Britain to locate a supply of stone for the building, eventually choosing Magnesian Limestone from the Anston quarry of the Duke of Leeds. Work started on building the river frontage on 1 January 1839, and Barry's wife laid the foundation stone on 27 April 1840. The stone was badly quarried and handled, and with the polluted atmosphere in London it proved to be problematic, with the first signs of deterioration showing in 1849, and extensive renovations required periodically. Although there was a setback in progress with a stonemasons' strike between September 1841 and May 1843, the House of Lords had its first sitting in the new chamber in 1847. In 1852 the Commons was finished, and both Houses sat in their new chambers for the first time; Queen Victoria first used the newly completed royal entrance. In the same year, while Barry was appointed a Knight Bachelor, Pugin suffered a mental breakdown and, following incarceration at Bethlehem Pauper Hospital for the Insane, died at the age of 40. The clock tower was completed in 1858, and the Victoria Tower in 1860; Barry died in May that year, before the building work was completed. The final stages of the work were overseen by his son, Edward, who continued working on the building until 1870. The total cost of the building came to around £2.5 million. Legacy In 1836 the Royal Commission on Public Records was formed to look into the loss of the parliamentary records, and make recommendations on the preservation of future archives. Their published recommendations in 1837 led to the Public Record Act (1838), which set up the Public Record Office, initially based in Chancery Lane. The fire became the "single most depicted event in nineteenth-century London ... attracting to the scene a host of engravers, watercolourists and painters". Among them were J.M.W. Turner, the landscape painter, who later produced two pictures of the fire, and the Romantic painter John Constable, who sketched the fire from a hansom cab on Westminster Bridge. The destruction of the standard measurements