Description
Big Ben is the great clock tower at the north end of the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, by the Thames: 96 meters of sand-colored stone and Gothic tracery, four huge dials and the bell whose boom has marked London's hours since 1859.
Strictly speaking, Big Ben is the bell inside, 13.5 tons of bronze. The tower was simply the Clock Tower until 2012, when it was renamed Elizabeth Tower for Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. Nearly everyone still calls the whole thing Big Ben.
The four dials are the first thing to look at: 6.9 meters across, each made of 324 pieces of opalescent glass in a gilded cast-iron frame. Under each one runs a Latin prayer for Queen Victoria, and the four is written IV, not IIII as on most clocks.
Look at the color too. The frames were painted black in the 1930s to hide the soot; the 2017–2021 restoration stripped it away and brought back the original Prussian blue, along with regilded faces and red-and-white shields of St George.
Higher up, 52 carved shields bear the emblems of the kingdom: the Tudor rose, the thistle, the shamrock and the leek. Above the belfry shines the Ayrton Light, lit whenever the House of Commons sits after dark. It first pointed toward Buckingham Palace, so Queen Victoria could see when the MPs were at work.
Then there is the sound. Every quarter hour four smaller bells play the Westminster Quarters, a tune borrowed from a church in Cambridge, and on the hour Big Ben answers with its deep E.
The tower was born from a disaster. In 1834 fire destroyed most of the old Palace of Westminster, and Charles Barry rebuilt it in Gothic style. For the clock tower he turned to Augustus Pugin: it was his last design before illness and death. "It is beautiful," Pugin wrote as he handed it over.
The bell had a troubled start. The first one cracked during testing. The second, hauled up in 18 hours, cracked too, two months after its first chime: the hammer was more than twice the weight it should have been.
The fix was simple. The bell was given an eighth of a turn and a new hammer, and it has rung with a slightly different tone ever since, crack and all. The nickname perhaps honors Sir Benjamin Hall, the tall minister who oversaw its installation, or a heavyweight boxer of the day.
The clock is famous for its precision. It chimed throughout the Blitz, even after a raid in May 1941 damaged two of its dials, and on New Year's Eve 2024 it struck midnight within five-thousandths of a second.
Don't miss
• The dials and their Prussian blue.
• The Westminster Quarters on the hour.
• The Ayrton Light after dark.
Did you know?
• The clock is regulated with old pennies stacked on the pendulum.
• In 1949 a flock of starlings perched on the minute hand and slowed the clock by four and a half minutes.
• The tower leans slightly to the north-west, about 50 centimeters at the top.
Strictly speaking, Big Ben is the bell inside, 13.5 tons of bronze. The tower was simply the Clock Tower until 2012, when it was renamed Elizabeth Tower for Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. Nearly everyone still calls the whole thing Big Ben.
The four dials are the first thing to look at: 6.9 meters across, each made of 324 pieces of opalescent glass in a gilded cast-iron frame. Under each one runs a Latin prayer for Queen Victoria, and the four is written IV, not IIII as on most clocks.
Look at the color too. The frames were painted black in the 1930s to hide the soot; the 2017–2021 restoration stripped it away and brought back the original Prussian blue, along with regilded faces and red-and-white shields of St George.
Higher up, 52 carved shields bear the emblems of the kingdom: the Tudor rose, the thistle, the shamrock and the leek. Above the belfry shines the Ayrton Light, lit whenever the House of Commons sits after dark. It first pointed toward Buckingham Palace, so Queen Victoria could see when the MPs were at work.
Then there is the sound. Every quarter hour four smaller bells play the Westminster Quarters, a tune borrowed from a church in Cambridge, and on the hour Big Ben answers with its deep E.
The tower was born from a disaster. In 1834 fire destroyed most of the old Palace of Westminster, and Charles Barry rebuilt it in Gothic style. For the clock tower he turned to Augustus Pugin: it was his last design before illness and death. "It is beautiful," Pugin wrote as he handed it over.
The bell had a troubled start. The first one cracked during testing. The second, hauled up in 18 hours, cracked too, two months after its first chime: the hammer was more than twice the weight it should have been.
The fix was simple. The bell was given an eighth of a turn and a new hammer, and it has rung with a slightly different tone ever since, crack and all. The nickname perhaps honors Sir Benjamin Hall, the tall minister who oversaw its installation, or a heavyweight boxer of the day.
The clock is famous for its precision. It chimed throughout the Blitz, even after a raid in May 1941 damaged two of its dials, and on New Year's Eve 2024 it struck midnight within five-thousandths of a second.
Don't miss
• The dials and their Prussian blue.
• The Westminster Quarters on the hour.
• The Ayrton Light after dark.
Did you know?
• The clock is regulated with old pennies stacked on the pendulum.
• In 1949 a flock of starlings perched on the minute hand and slowed the clock by four and a half minutes.
• The tower leans slightly to the north-west, about 50 centimeters at the top.