Big Ben

Stand still for a moment and listen. Under the traffic on Westminster Bridge, under the red buses and the river wind, there is a low, deep note that rolls across the water every hour. You feel it in your chest a fraction before you hear it clearly. That sound is Big Ben. And here is the first surprise: the name does not belong to the tower in front of you at all. It belongs to a bell hidden inside it.

The golden-brown tower rising above you is officially called the Elizabeth Tower. For most of its life it was simply the Clock Tower. In 2012 it was renamed to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth the Second, her sixty years on the throne. Yet almost nobody uses the new name in daily speech. Londoners, visitors and newsreaders all say Big Ben. The nickname of the bell slowly took over the whole building.

To understand why the tower stands here, go back to October 1834. A fire broke out in the old Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament. It spread through the night. Crowds gathered on the riverbanks to watch, and painters sketched the flames. By morning, most of the medieval palace was gone. Only a few older parts survived, including the great Westminster Hall. Parliament needed a new home, and it needed a design competition to choose one.

The architect Charles Barry won that competition. He planned the long riverside palace you see today. But Barry worked with a younger designer called Augustus Pugin, a passionate champion of the Gothic style. Gothic here means the pointed arches, tall windows and carved stone tracery of medieval churches. Pugin drew the details of this clock tower. It was among the last major works of his life. He fell seriously ill soon afterwards and died young, never seeing the tower finished.

Look up at the four clock faces. Each one is several metres wide, large enough that a double-decker bus could nearly lie across it. The dials are made of hundreds of small pieces of opal glass set into an iron frame. At night they glow from behind. During a long restoration that ended in 2022, the iron hands and frames were repainted in a deep Prussian blue. That colour matches what researchers believe the original Victorian scheme looked like, under layers of later black paint.

Now look just below each dial. A line of gilded Latin letters runs across the stone. It reads, in translation, O Lord, keep safe our Queen Victoria the First. The tower was completed during her reign, in 1859, and the builders wanted her name on it. Most people walk past without reading it. Once you know it is there, the tower feels less like a postcard and more like a dedication.

The clock itself had a difficult birth. Its design came from a lawyer and amateur clockmaker, Edmund Beckett Denison, working with the Astronomer Royal, George Airy. Airy insisted on very high accuracy: the first strike of each hour had to be correct to within a second. Many professional clockmakers said this was impossible for a clock so large and so exposed to wind. The clockmaker Edward John Dent and his family firm built it anyway, and they succeeded.

The secret was a clever device called a double three-legged gravity escapement. In simple terms, it separates the swinging pendulum from the heavy push of the wind on the hands. The pendulum can keep a steady beat even in a storm. And here is the second surprise. The timekeeping is still adjusted with old pre-decimal penny coins. Keepers place a coin on the pendulum to make the clock run slightly faster, or remove one to slow it down.

The bell has its own drama. The first great bell cracked during testing and had to be broken up. A second bell was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in east London and hauled up inside the tower. Within months, it cracked too. Rather than replace it again, engineers turned the bell slightly and fitted a lighter hammer. The crack is still there today. That small fault is part of the reason Big Ben sounds the way it does.

Where did the name come from? Nobody knows for certain. One popular story says the bell was named after Sir Benjamin Hall, a large man who oversaw public works at the time. Another tale links it to Benjamin Caunt, a well-known heavyweight boxer of the era. Both stories are told with confidence by guides and taxi drivers. Neither has been proven, so enjoy them as legends rather than history.

Around the great bell hang four smaller quarter bells. Every fifteen minutes they play part of a melody known as the Westminster Chimes. The tune was borrowed from a church in Cambridge, and it has since spread to doorbells and mantel clocks around the world. Since 1923, the BBC has broadcast the bongs on radio. For many people far from London, this sound has marked New Year, news bulletins and national moments of silence.

Look above the clock faces, near the very top of the tower. There is a lantern called the Ayrton Light. When either house of Parliament sits after dark, the light is switched on. It is a quiet signal to the city that its lawmakers are still at work. If you are here in the evening and see it glowing, the debates inside the palace beside you have not yet finished.

Before you move on, take one last look. Notice how the warm limestone changes colour as clouds pass over the river. Notice the people around you lifting their phones at the same angle, all waiting for the hour. And if you are lucky enough to be standing here when it strikes, let the first deep note settle. That cracked old bell has been keeping time over this river for more than a century and a half. It will keep counting long after you have walked on.