Big Ben
Big Ben is the nickname for the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster, and, by extension, for the clock tower which stands at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London, England. Originally named simply Clock Tower, the structure was renamed to Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. The clock is a striking clock with five bells.
The tower was designed by Augustus Pugin and Sir Charles Barry in the Perpendicular Gothic style and was completed in 1859. It is decorated with stone carvings and features symbols related to the four countries of the United Kingdom and the Tudor dynasty. A Latin inscription celebrates Queen Victoria, under whose reign the palace was built. It stands tall, and the climb from ground level to the belfry is 334 steps. Its base is square, measuring on each side. The dials of the clock are in diameter.
The clock uses its original mechanism and was the largest and most accurate four-faced striking and chiming clock in the world upon its completion. It was designed by Edmund Beckett Denison and George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, and constructed by Edward John Dent and Frederick Dent. It is known for its reliability, and can be adjusted by adding or removing pre-decimal pennies from the pendulum. The Great Bell was cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and weighs. Its nickname, "Big Ben", derives from the tall Sir Benjamin Hall, who oversaw its installation. There are four quarter bells, which chime on the quarter hours.
Big Ben is a British cultural icon. It is a prominent symbol of Britain and parliamentary democracy, and is often used in the establishing shot of films set in London. The bells are broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 in the UK; and internationally on both the BBC World Service and online on BBC Sounds every day before news at 18:00 and 00:00, with an additional broadcast at 22:00 on Sundays. It has been part of a Grade I listed building since 1970, and in 1987 it was designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The clock and tower were renovated between 2017 and 2021, during which the bells remained silent. During this time, the BBC broadcast a recording of the bells on radio in replacement before news.
Tower
History
Elizabeth Tower, originally named the Clock Tower, and popularly known as "Big Ben", was built as a part of Charles Barry's design for a new Palace of Westminster after the old palace was largely destroyed by fire on 16 October 1834. Although Barry was the chief architect of the neo-gothic palace, he turned to Augustus Pugin for the design of the Clock Tower, which resembles earlier designs by Pugin, including one for Scarisbrick Hall, a country house in Lancashire. Construction of the tower began on 28 September 1843. The building contractors were Thomas Grissell and Morton Peto. An inscribed trowel in the Parliamentary Archives records that Emily, sister of Peto's daughter-in-law, was given the honour of laying the first stone. It was Pugin's last design before his descent into mental illness and death in 1852, and Pugin himself wrote, at the time of Barry's last visit to him to collect the drawings, "I never worked so hard in my life for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all my designs for finishing his bell tower and it is beautiful".Design
Completed in 1859, the tower is designed in Pugin's Gothic Revival style and is high, making it the third-tallest clock tower in Britain. Its dials are above ground level. Its base is square, measuring on each side, resting on concrete foundations thick. It was constructed using bricks clad on the exterior with sand-coloured Anston limestone from South Yorkshire, topped by a spire covered in hundreds of cast iron roof-tiles. There is a spiral staircase with 290 stone steps up to the clock room, followed by 44 to reach the belfry, and an additional 59 to the top of the spire.Above the belfry and the Ayrton Light are 52 shields decorated with national emblems of the four countries of the UK: the red and white rose of the Tudor dynasty of England, the thistle of Scotland, shamrock of Northern Ireland, and leek of Wales. They also feature the pomegranate of Catherine of Aragon, first wife of the Tudor king Henry VIII; the portcullis, symbolising both Houses of Parliament; and fleurs-de-lis, a legacy from when English monarchs claimed to rule France.
A ventilation shaft running from ground level up to the belfry, which measures by, was designed by David Boswell Reid, known as "the grandfather of air-conditioning". It was intended to draw cool, fresh air into the Palace of Westminster; in practice this did not work and the shaft was repurposed as a chimney until around 1914. The 2017–2021 conservation works included the addition of a lift in the shaft.
Its foundations rest on a layer of gravel, below which is London Clay. Owing to this soft ground, the tower leans slightly to the north-west by roughly over 55 m height, giving an inclination of approximately. This includes a planned maximum of 22 mm increased tilt due to tunnelling for the Jubilee Line Extension. In the 1990s thousands of tons of concrete were pumped into the ground underneath the tower to stabilise it during construction of the Westminster section of the Jubilee line of the London Underground. It leans by about at the finial. Experts believe the leaning will not be a problem for another 4,000 to 10,000 years.
Ayrton Light
A new feature was added in 1873 by Acton Smee Ayrton, then First Commissioner of Works and Public Buildings. The Ayrton Light is a lantern sited above the belfry and is lit whenever the House of Commons sits after dark. It can be seen from across London. Originally, it shone towards Buckingham Palace so Queen Victoria could look out of a window and see when the Commons were at work.Prison Room
Inside the tower is an oak-panelled Prison Room, which can only be accessed from the House of Commons, not via the tower entrance. It was last used in 1880 when Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist and the newly elected member of Parliament for Northampton, was imprisoned by the Serjeant at Arms after he protested against swearing a religious oath of allegiance to Queen Victoria. Officially, the Serjeant at Arms can still make arrests, as they have had the authority to do since 1415. The room, however, is currently occupied by the Petitions Committee, which oversees petitions submitted to Parliament.Name
Journalists during Queen Victoria's reign called it St Stephen's Tower. As members of Parliament originally sat at St Stephen's Hall, these journalists referred to anything related to the House of Commons as "news from St Stephens", a term that survives in Welsh-language political reporting as "San Steffan". The Palace does contain a feature called St Stephen's Tower, located above the public entrance. On 2 June 2012 the House of Commons voted in support of a proposal to change the name from the Clock Tower to Elizabeth Tower in commemoration of Queen Elizabeth II in her Diamond Jubilee year, since the large west tower known as Victoria Tower had been renamed in tribute to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. On 26 June 2012 the Commons confirmed that the name change could proceed. David Cameron, then the prime minister, announced the change of name on 12 September 2012. It was marked by a naming ceremony in which John Bercow, then Speaker of the House of Commons, unveiled a plaque attached to the tower on the adjoining Speaker's Green.Clock
Dials
Augustus Pugin drew inspiration from the clockmaker Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy when he designed the dials. Each is made of cast iron sections bolted together. The whole frame is in diameter making them the third-largest in the UK. They each contain 324 pieces of opalescent glass. It has been claimed that no two of the pieces of glass in each dial are the same.Originally, the dials were backlit using gas lamps, at first only when Parliament was sitting, but they have routinely been illuminated from dusk until dawn since 1876. Electric bulbs were installed at the beginning of the 20th century. The ornate surrounds of the dials are gilded. At the base of each dial is the Latin inscription DOMINE SALVAM FAC REGINAM NOSTRAM VICTORIAM PRIMAM, which means "O Lord, keep safe our Queen Victoria the First". Unlike Roman numeral clock dials that show the "4" position as IIII, the Great Clock faces depict "4" as IV. Its gun metal hour hands and copper minute hands are and long respectively.
When completed, the dials and clock hands were Prussian blue, but were painted black in the 1930s to disguise the effects of air pollution. The original colour scheme was reinstated during the 2017–2021 conservation work. Analysis of the paint layers found that no fewer than six different colour schemes had been used over the past 160 years. The Victorian glass was also removed and replaced with faithful reproductions made in Germany by the glassmakers Glasfabrik Lamberts.
Movement
The clock's movement is known for its reliability. The designers were the lawyer and amateur horologist Edmund Beckett Denison and George Airy, the Astronomer Royal. Construction was entrusted to the clockmaker Edward John Dent; after his death in 1853, his stepson Frederick Dent completed the work in 1854. As the tower was not completed until 1859, Denison had time to experiment before its installation in April that year: instead of using a deadbeat escapement and remontoire as originally designed, he invented a double three-legged gravity escapement, which provides the best separation between pendulum and clock mechanism, thus mitigating the effects of rain, wind and snow on the dials. Denison never patented his design, and it quickly became the standard on all new high-quality tower clocks.On top of the pendulum is a small stack of pre-decimal penny coins; these are to adjust the time of the clock. Adding a coin has the effect of minutely lifting the position of the pendulum's centre of mass, reducing the effective length of the pendulum rod and hence increasing the rate at which the pendulum swings. Adding or removing a penny will change the clock's speed by 0.4 seconds per day. Other coins have been placed on the pendulum as well; in 2009, three of the pennies were replaced with a £5 commemorative coin minted to celebrate the then-upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics.
Big Ben keeps time to within a few seconds per week. It is hand wound three times a week. The Keeper of the Clock is responsible for looking after the movement in addition to overseeing every aspect of maintenance around the Palace. A team of horologists are on call 24 hours a day to attend to the clock in the event of an emergency; they are also responsible for about 300 other clocks in the Palace of Westminster.
On 10 May 1941, the day before the Blitz during the Second World War ended, an air raid by the Luftwaffe of Nazi Germany damaged two of the dials and sections of the tower's stepped roof and destroyed the Commons chamber. The architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott designed a new five-floor block. Two floors are occupied by the current chamber, which was used for the first time on 26 October 1950. The clock ran accurately and chimed throughout the Blitz.