Time: About Big Ben
This month’s theme of the b5media Travel and Culture channel is Time. I thought it would be appropriate to write about the most famous timepiece in all of London!
It’s a bit of a misconception that the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster (aka Parliament) is called Big Ben. Big Ben is actually the name of the bell inside the tower, behind the clock.
The Palace’s Clock Tower is one of the iconic images of London, and you can see it featured in this blog’s logo and in the photo above. The gothic clock faces are 23 feet in diameter, and are made up of 312 individual pieces of glass. The hour hand is 9 feet long and the minute hand is 14 feet long.
Big Ben is as I mentioned the name of the large bell inside. The original was cracked while in storage (waiting for the tower to be built), and the re-cast bell is now in the tower. It weighs 13.5 tons and has a diameter of nearly 10 feet. Additionally, there are four other bells in the tower’s belfry that chime the quarter hours.
The clock itself is known for its reliability. Though very severe weather has been known to play havoc with the mechanisms in recent years, it has had only one real breakdown, in 1976.
One other strange thing about the Palace of Westminster is how the Clock Tower and Queen’s Tower are typically portrayed. Even though the Queen’s Tower is both slightly taller and much larger by volume than the Clock Tower (aka Big Ben), most tourist representations show the opposite. The fact that Big Ben has become such an iconic image of London has led to an odd diminishment on some tourist souvenirs! (The Queen’s Tower, officially known as the Victoria Tower, is at the far left in the photo at the top of this post.)
Getting there: Take the District, Circle, or Jubilee line on the Tube to Westminster station. I highly recommend following the signs inside the station to Exit #2. You’ll see what I mean when you get there. It’s the best “first” view of Parliament that you could probably ever see.
Photos from Flickr.
3 Comments
It really is such an iconic London image. I hope to see it in person some day!
Hello, Heather. I hope you do, too! It’s a beautiful building in an amazing city.
[...] that note, Jed at the London Traveler reminds us that Big Ben is in fact a bell, not a clock, but as it strikes every fifteen minutes it’s one of the most [...]