Happy birthday Big Ben

20 May 2009

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Though the moral fabric of Parliament is in tatters, its architecture remains an inspiration. Stephen Bayley celebrates Pugin’s crazy, magnificent clock tower

Boing. That most familiar sound is now 150 years old. Because I am fortunate enough to live near Westminster, I often hear it during solitary moments at night in the bathroom. But, like the rest of the world, I know it even better from radio. At home or abroad, its sombre, magnificent melancholy is both reassuring and — somehow — a little bit disturbing, as time passing always is. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf wrote ‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable’. In peace and war, trouble and strife, mourning and celebration, here and now, Big Ben reminds us of ourselves. Our permanence and our transitoriness.

‘Big Ben’ is, of course, not the name of that most famous clock tower, the universal symbol of London, but the name of the gigantic bell which hangs in its belfry. The first Big Ben was cast in Warren’s Foundry in Stockton-on-Tees. Warren’s metallurgical reach was beyond its metallurgical grasp and the original bell cracked in October 1857, while undergoing sonic tests in the yard. Its fragments were used for a new casting made in Whitechapel. It rang on 11 July 1859 and ‘The Westminster Chimes’ are adapted from a tune by Handel.

But ‘Big Ben’ has become an eponym for the idiosyncratic 96-metre structure that accommodates it. In an infallible synaesthesia, the sound of the bell immediately evokes an image of the tower and, therefore, of London itself. That even its silhouette is an unambiguous reference to the city teaches important lessons about architectural monuments and their contribution to national identity. As silhouettes, only the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower rival Big Ben (although the Gherkin, I believe, is coming up fast).

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