Queen's Tower, London
The Queen's Tower is a tower topped with a copper-covered dome. It is situated in the South Kensington Campus of Imperial College London, England, just north of the Imperial College Road. To reach the base of the dome from the ground on foot, one must ascend a series of narrow spiral staircases with 325 steps in total. The tower used to be the central tower of the Imperial Institute, and is now the sole remaining part of that building.
History
The Imperial Institute was founded on Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, and its partial demolition began in 1957. At that time it was generally known as the Collcutt Tower, after its designer, the Victorian architect Thomas Edward Collcutt. The tower itself would have been demolished along with the rest of the Institute, had it not been for a public campaign led by the then Poet Laureate John Betjeman, a supporter of 19th-century architecture. He warned that tastes in architecture change, and that the destruction of this building would be a loss.Restoration
In 1966, with the rest of the building demolished, the tower was repaired to enable it to stand on its own, which involved the construction of new foundations. There are also two stone lions at the foot of the tower, which were once set at the entrance to the Imperial Institute. These two stone lions are pair of a set of four, the other two are in the grounds of the Commonwealth Institute.In 2022 works started to complete repairs to the masonry and replace the copper roof, following a fail of masonry. The timber louvres around the bell chamber will be replaced along with repairs or replacement of the flat roofs to the balconies. The work is expected to take two years to complete. The work required an 83m free-standing scaffold tower consisting of an inner access scaffold, outer scaffold exoskeleton and a bespoke circular temporary roof covering. Propping was installed in the basement tunnels and transfer the load into the tower's foundations.