Big Ben is the nickname of the 13.7-tonne Great Bell inside the 96-metre Elizabeth Tower at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London. People commonly use the name for the whole clock tower too. The bell first rang in July 1859, and after a £80 million restoration from 2017 to 2022 it strikes every hour again.
The tower was called simply the Clock Tower until 2012, when Parliament renamed it the Elizabeth Tower for Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. The bell has never had another official name. It is formally the Great Bell of Westminster, and "Big Ben" began as a newspaper nickname.
Nobody knows for certain whom the nickname refers to. The most common explanation is Sir Benjamin Hall, the large, heavily built First Commissioner of Works whose name was reportedly inscribed on the bell when it was hung in 1858. The other candidate is Benjamin Caunt, a heavyweight prize-fighter of the 1840s and 1850s known as "Big Ben", whose nickname was often given to anything very large. Either way, the name was in use within months of the bell's arrival. Officials have never adopted it, and parliamentary documents still call the bell the Great Bell.
A Tower Born From a Fire
On the night of 16 October 1834, workmen burning old wooden tally sticks in a furnace under the House of Lords set the medieval Palace of Westminster on fire. Most of the palace was destroyed. Westminster Hall, built in 1097, survived. In 1836 Charles Barry won the competition to design a new palace in the Gothic style, and he brought in Augustus Welby Pugin to design the detailed decoration.
The clock tower was one of the last parts of the palace to be finished and one of the last things Pugin designed. He produced the drawings in 1852, shortly before his breakdown and death at the age of 40. The tower is built of brick clad in Anston limestone from Yorkshire, and its spire is cast iron. It rises about 96 metres. There are 334 steps to the belfry. There is no public lift.
The tower now leans slightly, about 0.26 degrees to the north-west. The lean is caused by ground movement from excavations nearby, including the extension of the Jubilee line in the 1990s. Engineers monitor it closely. At the current rate it would take thousands of years to reach the lean of the tower at Pisa.
Casting the Bell Twice
The Great Bell had a difficult start. The first bell, cast in 1856 by John Warner & Sons at Stockton-on-Tees and weighing about 16 tonnes, cracked while being tested in New Palace Yard. The metal was melted down and recast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in April 1858. The new bell weighs about 13.7 tonnes, is 2.2 m tall and 2.7 m across, and sounds the note E.
It was hauled up the shaft of the tower lying on its side. It first struck the hours on 11 July 1859. Within months it had cracked as well, because the original hammer was far too heavy. For about three years the hours were struck on the largest of the four quarter bells. In 1863 the Great Bell was turned an eighth of a turn so that a lighter hammer would hit undamaged metal, and a square piece was cut out at the end of the crack to stop it spreading. It has kept that crack ever since, and it gives Big Ben its slightly buzzing tone.
The four quarter bells ring the Westminster Quarters, a tune borrowed from Great St Mary's Church in Cambridge. It is sometimes linked with a phrase from Handel's Messiah.
Inside the Clock Mechanism
The clock was designed by Edmund Beckett Denison, a lawyer and amateur horologist, to meet a standard set by the Astronomer Royal, George Airy. Airy required the first stroke of each hour to be accurate to within one second, far better than any public clock of the time. It was built by Edward John Dent and finished after his death by his stepson Frederick Dent in 1854. It then waited five years for the tower to be ready.
- The escapement: Denison invented a double three-legged gravity escapement. It separates the pendulum from the force of wind and snow on the huge hands, and it became standard for tower clocks around the world.
- The pendulum: It is 3.9 m long, weighs about 300 kg and beats once every two seconds.
- The pennies: A small stack of old pre-decimal pennies sits on the pendulum. Adding one raises the pendulum's centre of mass slightly and makes the clock gain about 0.4 seconds a day.
- The dials: Each of the four dials is 7 m across and made from 312 pieces of pot opal glass, held in a cast-iron frame. The minute hands are about 4.2 m long.
The clock has stopped only a few times. The best-known stoppages were in 1949, when a flock of starlings perched on a minute hand and slowed the clock by about four and a half minutes, and in 1976, when metal fatigue broke the chiming mechanism. The 1976 failure was the clock's only major breakdown, and repairs took months.
Below the clock room there is a small room once used as a prison for members of Parliament. It was last used in 1880, when the newly elected MP Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist, was held there overnight after refusing to take the religious oath of allegiance. The House of Commons has not used its power to imprison anyone since, but the room is still there.
The £80 Million Restoration, 2017–2022
In August 2017 the Great Bell was silenced for the longest period in its history so the tower could be renovated. The project was first estimated at £29 million, but the final cost was about £80 million, after surveyors found asbestos, pollution damage, bomb damage from the Second World War and badly cracked stonework. Every part of the clock was taken apart and cleaned or repaired. The tower got its first lift for maintenance staff and emergency access. The old pot opal glass was replaced where it had broken.
The most visible change was the colour. The restorers found that Barry and Pugin had painted the dial frames and hands Prussian blue, not black. They were probably painted black in the 1930s, partly because of London's soot. Today they are blue with gilded details again. The bell rang briefly for New Year's Eve and Remembrance Sunday during the works, and its regular chimes returned in November 2022.
Elizabeth Tower vs Victoria Tower: Westminster's Two Towers
At the other end of the Palace of Westminster, above the House of Lords, stands the Victoria Tower. The two are often confused in photos, and they differ in several ways:
- Height: The Victoria Tower is slightly taller, at about 98.5 m to the Elizabeth Tower's 96 m. The clock tower looks taller because it stands alone on the corner by Westminster Bridge.
- Purpose: The Elizabeth Tower holds the clock and bells. The Victoria Tower holds the Parliamentary Archives, millions of documents including original Acts of Parliament going back to 1497.
- Flag: A Union Flag flies from the Victoria Tower when Parliament is sitting. The Royal Standard replaces it when the monarch is present. The Elizabeth Tower instead has the Ayrton Light, a lantern above the dials that shines after dark whenever the House of Commons is sitting. It was installed in the 1880s and named after Acton Smee Ayrton, the First Commissioner of Works who first proposed it.
- Entrance: The Sovereign's Entrance at the base of the Victoria Tower is the door the monarch uses for the State Opening of Parliament.
Our guide to the Palace of Westminster covers the rest of the building, which has more than 1,100 rooms and is itself a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Westminster Abbey.
Visiting, Hearing and Broadcasting the Bell
Tours of the Elizabeth Tower reopened after the restoration and are no longer limited to UK residents. Anyone aged 11 or over can book a 90-minute guided tour on the UK Parliament website. The tour goes up the 334 steps, past the clock mechanism, behind one of the illuminated dials and into the belfry while the bells strike. Ear defenders are provided. UK residents can also request a free tour through their MP, but places are limited.
The bell became world-famous through radio. The BBC first broadcast the chimes on New Year's Eve 1923, and they still introduce some BBC Radio 4 news bulletins. During the Second World War the dials were kept dark for the blackout, but the bell kept striking and was broadcast across occupied Europe. The chimes also mark the start of the two-minute silence on Remembrance Sunday and the new year, when crowds along the Thames count down to the first stroke of midnight.
For the best views, the south end of Westminster Bridge and the Albert Embankment across the river show the tower and the whole river front of the palace. Parliament Square gives the classic view up at the clock faces. Our overview of London's geography explains why Westminster, on what was once a marshy island in the Thames, became the centre of government.