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

He favoured brandy with water as a treatment for his disturbances. Eventually, they tried bleeding him with leeches, but he ended-up raving in Bedlam, while Barry was knighted. The question of authorship was, therefore, always confused. Pugin was never completely credited with the clock tower design, but nor did Barry have the neck actually to deny it. Nor claim it as his own. Rosemary Hill, in her magnificent 2007 biography of Pugin, God’s Architect, says there is no doubt that the conception of Big Ben was Pugin’s.

Barry had seen Westminster burning while returning from Brighton by coach. The terrible glow lit up the night sky throughout the south-east. The smell of fire was everywhere. A rather less noble odour currently surrounds Parliament. Indeed, it’s fair comment to say that Parliament needs moral rebuilding in 2009 as urgently as it needed architectural reconstruction after the fire of 1834. ‘Whatever we may think of our members,’ John Betjeman wrote in the Daily Telegraph in May 1957, ‘we all admire the Houses of Parliament’. He meant, of course, the buildings themselves.

And the clock itself? The original brief required the first stroke of the hour to be accurate to within one second. A telegraphic connection to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich kept a continuous check on this. Exemplars of accuracy sit uncomfortably with Parliament this year, but as proof of what a designer of genius can achieve for national prestige, Pugin’s clock tower is unsurpassed. He did it while going mad and careless of budget. There’s a metaphor struggling to escape here.

Boing.

Stephen Bayley is architecture and design correspondent for the Observer.