Big Ben
Big Ben

"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]. "

References

[1], [2] Louise. Nicholson, LONDON. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 1998.
[3] Andrew. Gumbel, London. London: Cadogan Books plc, 1998.

 
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Sat Feb 4 18:44:15 2012

Neoclassical Houses Of Parliament