Big Ben

Interesting facts

The Great Bell cracked months after it first rang in 1859; instead of recasting it, workers turned it an eighth of a turn, and it still rings cracked.

The first bell, cast in Stockton-on-Tees in 1856, cracked beyond repair during testing; its replacement took 18 hours to haul up to the belfry.

Inside the tower is a small Prison Room, last used in 1880 to hold MP Charles Bradlaugh after he objected to swearing a religious oath.

A lantern above the clock faces, the Ayrton Light, is lit whenever the House of Commons sits after dark; it once faced Buckingham Palace for Queen Victoria.

In August 1949 a flock of starlings settled on the minute hand and slowed the clock by four and a half minutes.

Each dial holds 324 pieces of opalescent glass, and the hour numeral four is written IV rather than the IIII usual on clock faces.

Painted black in the 1930s to hide soot, the dials and hands were returned to their original Prussian blue during the 2017–2021 restoration.

Because radio travels faster than sound, some Londoners listening to a live broadcast near the tower can hear the bell strike thirteen at noon or midnight.

At monarchs' funerals the bell has tolled once for each year of their life, ending with 96 strokes for Elizabeth II in 2022.

The tower leans slightly north-west on its London Clay foundations, by about 500 mm at the top of the spire.

Why it is worth it

Everyone calls the tower Big Ben, but that name actually belongs to the bell inside it — the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster — and the tower itself wasn't even called Elizabeth Tower until 2012, when it was renamed for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Before that it was simply the Clock Tower, which undersells what a fight it took to get built.

The tower exists because the old Palace of Westminster burned down almost completely on 16 October 1834. Charles Barry won the resulting design competition — 97 architects entered — with a grand Gothic Revival scheme for the whole rebuilt palace, and his 96-metre clock tower needed detailing his own training hadn't prepared him for, so he brought in Augustus Pugin specifically to handle it. It's Pugin's decorative work — the tracery, the ornament, the clock faces — that gives the tower its unmistakable Perpendicular Gothic silhouette, even though Barry held the overall commission. Construction ran from 1843 to 1859, and by the time it was finished, Pugin was gone: this was his last major design before a rapid mental decline led to his death in 1852, at just forty — a fact historians still weigh when arguing over how much of the tower's character is really his.

The clock mechanism itself, designed separately by lawyer and amateur horologist Edmund Beckett Denison and built by clockmaker Edward John Dent, was famous from the start for its accuracy — a rare thing for a public clock that size in the 1850s, achieved partly through a self-correcting pendulum that uses a small stack of coins resting on it to fine-tune the swing, a trick still used today to keep the clock within about a second of true time.

Getting there

Located in London. London City Airport (LCY) is about 13 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

From the encyclopaedia

Big Ben is the nickname for the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster, and, by extension, for the clock tower that stands at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London, England. Originally named the Clock Tower, the structure was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. The clock is a striking clock with five bells.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia