"The sweeping view of the Docklands,
the City's cluster of towers, the dome of St Paul's and,
upriver around a curve in the Thames, the pinnacles of
the Houses of Parliament and the tower of
Big Ben, all of them at dawn `standing clean and stripped,
like a boxer entering a ring, for another twenty-four rounds
with Fate. [1]."
"When H.V.Morton's words were first published in 1926,
in The Nights of London,
although he described the dawn
scene as beautiful, the capital was not in good shape.
During the horrific First World War of 1914-18, It had
suffered bombs and food shortages, and in the aftermath there
were docks lying idle, high unemployment and a chronic need
for housing. Its sorry state was compounded by the Second
World War of 1939-45, which
brought devastation to London.
The Blitz demolished a third of the City, many docks
and the House of Commons. Big Ben survived,
though, and the chimes helped to keep British spirits
up. [2]. "
"The inadequacies of the old Palace of Westminster were
recognized as early as the 1820s. A new building might have
been proposed there and then, but ministers baulked at the cost
of such scheme so soon after the Napoleonic Wars. It
took a calamity to spring them into action.
On 16 October 1834, the Clerk of Works, a Mr Richard
Wibley, was asked to destroy several bundles of old tally sticks
in a cellar furnace. The fire raged out of control, and the
whole palace was soon engulfed in flames. The Times newspaper
wrote jocularly the following day that the 'motion for a new
House is carried without a division'.
Augustus Pugin had been an eyewitness to the 1834 fire
and revelled in every minute of it. He hated classical architecture
and neoclassical architects and was only too happy to see their
various improvements to the old parliament go up in smoke.
'There is nothing much to regret and much to rejoice in a vast
quantity of Soane's mixtures and Wyatt's heresies effectually
consigned to oblivion, ' he wrote. 'Oh what a glorious sight
to see his composition mullions and cement pinnacles and battlements
flying and cracking…' Fearing that a neoclassical architect
would be asked to design the new parliament, Pugin put
his name forward and, although he was only 24 at the time, was
named assistant to the older, more experienced Charles Barry.
Theirs was a near perfect partnership, Barry sketched
out the broad lines of the design, while Pugin attended
to the details of ornamentation. Some of Pugin's work
was lost in the bombing of the Second World War; you can nevertheless
admire the sheer fervour of his imagination in the sculpted
wood and stone, the stained glass, tiled floors, wallpaper and
painted ceilings that abound along every corridor and in every
room.
Despite Pugin's rantings against the classicists, he
was happy to go along with Barry's essentially classical
design and Gothicize it to his heart's content. The Palace
of Westminster's blend of architectural restraint (Barry)
and decorative frenzy (Pugin) is one of its most appealing aspects.
Pugin went mad and died in 1852, and so never lived to
work on the most famous feature of the new building, the clock
tower at the eastern end known universally by the name of
its giant bell, Big Ben. Nowadays the clock is renowned
for its accuracy and its resounding tolling of the hour, but
the story of its construction is one of incredible incompetence
and bungling.
The 320ft high clock tower was finished in 1854, but
because of a bitter disagreement between the two clockmakers,
Frederick Dent and Edmund Beckett Denison, there
was nothing to put inside it for another three years.
Finally
a great bell made up according to Denison's instruction
was dragged across Westminster Bridge by a cart and 16
horses. But, as it was being laid out ready for hoisting into
position, a 4ft crack suddenly appeared, and the bell had to
be abandoned. Similar embarrassments ensued over the next two
years, until a functioning, but still cracked bell was at last
erected at the top of the tower. It remains defective to this
day. Why the name Big Ben? The most common explanation is
that the bell was named after Sir Benjamin Hall, the
unpopular Chief Commissioner of Works who had to explain
all the cock ups in his project to an unimpressed House of
Commons.
Another theory has it that Big Ben was in fact Benjamin
Caunt, a corpulent boxer who owned a pub a couple of hundred
yards away in St Martin's Lane. The chimes, which are
well known around the world because they are broadcast by the
BBC World Service.
After such an inauspicious beginning, the Clock has had a remarkably
uneventful history, only seriously going wrong during the Second
World War, when the belfry stage of the tower was damaged and
the Clock face shattered by bombing. Once, in 1949, the hands
stopped turning under the weight of a flock of starlings. Since
then, apart from a dry bearing which stopped the Big Ben twice
in 1997, Big Ben has proved unfailingly accurate. [3]. "
