A new appreciation of the importance of space, place and mobility has characterized imperial historians' recent ‘spatial turn’. With a case study of the simultaneous transformation of different sites of the British Empire during a moment of reform and restructuring in the 1830s, this lecture suggests that historians of Empire still have much to gain from a consideration of the ways that geographers have conceptualized these phenomena. Trajectories of people, capital and ideas cause the changes that literally ‘take place’ over time but also concurrently, and they are often mobilized from particular locales of concentrated power within relatively short timeframes. In this case that locale was Westminster, London, over the course of two parliamentary sessions.