Houses of Parliament & Big Ben

10 min read

The Houses of Parliament may be London's most convincing piece of historical illusion. Seen from across the Thames, the pinnacles, towers, Gothic windows and acres of carved stone suggest a building that has accumulated over the Middle Ages. In reality, almost the entire riverfront is Victorian. The present Palace of Westminster was constructed after 1840, and its most famous tower was not completed until the 1850s. The genuinely medieval part is largely hidden around the corner: Westminster Hall, begun more than seven centuries earlier.

Even the name of London's best-known landmark is misleading. Big Ben is not technically the clock tower. It is the 13.5-tonne bell inside it. The tower was simply the Clock Tower for most of its existence and was renamed Elizabeth Tower only in 2012, to mark Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. Londoners have nevertheless been calling the whole structure Big Ben for so long that the distinction is now largely a matter for pedants and pub quizzes.

The history of Parliament on this site begins long before either existed. Westminster was once Thorney Island, a marshy patch of higher ground surrounded by branches of the River Tyburn beside a much wider Thames. Edward the Confessor built a royal palace here in the eleventh century while constructing Westminster Abbey alongside it. The proximity was deliberate: church, king and eventually government grew up almost on top of one another.

The oldest surviving fragment came a generation later. William II, known as William Rufus, began Westminster Hall in 1097. Completed two years later, it was probably the largest hall in Europe, a space intended as a demonstration of royal power rather than merely somewhere to hold meetings or eat dinner. Its dimensions are still extraordinary: roughly 73 metres long and 20 metres wide.

What you see overhead, however, is not Norman. Richard II remodelled the Hall three centuries later and commissioned its immense hammer-beam roof in 1393. The carpentry of Hugh Herland allowed an uninterrupted span of about 20 metres without rows of columns beneath it. Around 660 tonnes of oak were framed near Farnham in Surrey and transported to Westminster by wagon and barge. It remains the largest medieval timber roof in Northern Europe.

The Hall became a stage for some of the most consequential episodes in British history. Royal courts sat here for centuries. Charles I was tried for treason here in 1649 before being executed along Whitehall. Later it became the setting for state trials, coronation banquets and, eventually, lyings-in-state. The building now encountered by visitors as an entrance to Parliament was therefore already around 700 years old before the Victorian Palace surrounding it was conceived.

Parliament itself settled into the old royal palace almost by accident. Henry VIII largely abandoned Westminster after a fire in 1512 and moved his court to the nearby Palace of Whitehall. Parliamentary institutions increasingly occupied the buildings left behind. In 1547 the House of Commons was given the former St Stephen's Chapel, whose long, narrow interior had opposing rows of choir stalls. That arrangement helped create the face-to-face layout still used in the Commons Chamber today. One of the most distinctive features of British parliamentary politics is therefore partly an architectural inheritance from a medieval chapel.

By the nineteenth century the old Palace of Westminster was an extraordinary jumble. Medieval halls and chapels had acquired Classical alterations, offices, passages and additions by architects including Christopher Wren, James Wyatt and John Soane. It was historically fascinating but increasingly unsuitable for a modern legislature.

Then, on 16 October 1834, almost all of it disappeared.

The cause was remarkably mundane. The Exchequer had accumulated old wooden tally sticks, an obsolete system once used to record financial transactions. Rather than simply remove them, workmen were instructed to burn two cartloads in furnaces beneath the House of Lords. The fires were allowed to become too hot, igniting nearby timber. By early evening flames were erupting through the Palace. Crowds gathered along the Thames to watch one of nineteenth-century London's greatest spectacles; J.M.W. Turner was among the artists who subsequently depicted it.

The Lords and Commons Chambers were lost. Westminster Hall very nearly followed them. Firefighters and volunteers concentrated their efforts on its ancient roof, aided by scaffolding already erected inside for repairs, a change in the wind and eventually enough water pumped from the Thames. Almost the entire parliamentary complex was destroyed, but the hall survived.

The catastrophe gave Britain an unusual opportunity: to invent what a national parliament should look like.

A Royal Commission decided that the replacement could not be Classical. Designs had to be either Gothic or Elizabethan, partly so that the new building would harmonise with Westminster Abbey and the surviving medieval structures. There was politics in the choice too. Classical architecture had become associated in some minds with republicanism and revolution; Gothic could instead be presented as a native architectural tradition tied to monarchy, continuity and the institutions of medieval England.

The competition was won by Charles Barry. This is slightly ironic because Barry was not primarily a Gothic architect. His underlying instincts were often Classical: symmetry, processional planning and carefully controlled proportions. To supply the intense medieval detail the project required, he increasingly relied on the brilliant young Augustus Welby Pugin, one of the great evangelists of the Gothic Revival.

Their division of labour explains much of the Palace's character. Barry was responsible for the huge architectural composition and its organisation; Pugin supplied an extraordinary amount of its Gothic language. He designed carvings, furniture, stained glass, metalwork, decorative schemes and countless fittings. Parliament's own architectural history notes that his involvement extended all the way down to such objects as doorknobs and spill trays.

The result is more carefully organised than its picturesque exterior suggests. From the river, Barry created an exceptionally long horizontal façade punctuated by an irregular skyline of turrets and towers. Inside, the principal ceremonial rooms form a constitutional diagram in stone. The Sovereign enters beneath Victoria Tower, progresses through the royal apartments and Royal Gallery towards the House of Lords; beyond lies Central Lobby and then the House of Commons. Monarch, Lords and Commons - the three components of Parliament - are effectively arranged along the same architectural spine.

The towers themselves have different jobs. Victoria Tower, at the southern end, was designed both as the grand royal entrance and as an enormous fireproof repository for Parliament's records. At 98.5 metres, it is actually taller than the Elizabeth Tower opposite. For years it was claimed as the largest and tallest square stone tower in the world.

The elegant tower in the middle is stranger. The Central Tower rises 91 metres above Central Lobby and looks like a purely decorative Gothic spire. It was actually conceived as part of the Palace's ventilation system: a giant chimney through which stale air and smoke could escape. One of the building's most conspicuous architectural ornaments was therefore originally a piece of environmental engineering.

And then there is the tower everyone notices first.

Barry struggled with how to make the proposed clock sufficiently prominent, and Pugin produced the detailed designs for the tower and its four clock faces. Parliament records these as among Pugin's final drawings for Barry before his death in 1852, aged only forty. The completed tower rises 96.3 metres, but the apparent delicacy of its Gothic decoration hides a distinctly industrial structure assembled from brick, stone and iron. Much of it was even built without conventional external scaffolding: materials were hauled up through the interior while a movable gantry rose with the masonry.

The clock inside was intended to be as technologically impressive as the architecture outside. The Astronomer Royal, George Airy, demanded a turret clock capable of striking the hour accurately to within a second - a formidable specification for a mechanism exposed to weather and driving enormous hands on four external faces. Edmund Beckett Denison devised the mechanism and clockmaker Edward John Dent was commissioned to build it, with Dent's stepson Frederick completing the work after his death.

Denison's crucial innovation was the double three-legged gravity escapement. It largely isolated the pendulum from forces such as wind pressure on the giant hands, allowing the mechanism to maintain extraordinary accuracy. The Great Clock began keeping time on 31 May 1859.

There is still something delightfully mechanical about how that accuracy is adjusted. The 4.4-metre pendulum can be fine-tuned using old pre-decimal pennies placed on it. Adding a single penny makes the clock gain roughly two-fifths of a second over 24 hours. Each dial is seven metres across; the minute hands are 4.2 metres long and weigh about 100 kilograms including their counterweights. From Parliament Square the clock looks like a piece of ornament. Inside the tower it is a five-tonne machine.

The bell proved much more troublesome. The first great bell was cast in 1856 but developed a 1.2-metre crack while being tested in New Palace Yard and had to be broken up. Its replacement was cast by George Mears at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in April 1858. It weighed 13.5 tonnes and was so large that it had to be turned sideways before being hauled up inside the tower, a process taking around thirty hours.

This is the bell properly called Big Ben. The origin of the nickname is not completely certain, although Parliament considers it probably a joking reference to Sir Benjamin Hall, the physically imposing First Commissioner of Works overseeing the project. Another tradition connects it with the heavyweight boxer Benjamin Caunt. The uncertainty is worth retaining: one of Britain's most famous names appears to have begun as a nickname whose inventor nobody recorded.

Big Ben first sounded in July 1859. Within weeks, it too cracked. Replacing another enormous bell would have been exceptionally difficult, so an ingenious repair was adopted instead. The bell was rotated so that the hammer struck an undamaged section, the original hammer was replaced with a lighter one, and a small square was cut at the end of the crack to prevent it spreading. Big Ben still carries the crack today. The slight imperfection in its famous E-natural note is therefore not deterioration awaiting repair; it is part of the sound London has known for more than 160 years.

There are other details almost invisible from the pavement. Beneath each clock face is the Latin inscription Domine salvam fac Reginam nostram Victoriam Primam - "O Lord, keep safe our Queen Victoria the First". Higher up is the Ayrton Light, installed in the nineteenth century and illuminated when either House is sitting after dark. The tower is simultaneously public clock, bell tower and distant indicator that Parliament is at work.

The rest of the Palace was also technologically modern beneath its medieval costume. Iron joists, brick arches and large amounts of metal construction were employed partly in an attempt to make the replacement safer from fire. Even so, the materials produced their own problems. Much of the exterior was faced with limestone from Anston in Yorkshire. Deterioration was visible by 1849, only a few years after construction began, as poor stone selection and London's polluted coal-burning atmosphere attacked its elaborate carving. Repair campaigns have continued ever since.

The Palace would face fire again under very different circumstances. During the Second World War it was struck by air raids on fourteen occasions. On the night of 10 May 1941 incendiaries set both Westminster Hall and the House of Commons ablaze. Firefighters concluded that they could not save both. The decision was made to protect the irreplaceable medieval hall; Barry's Commons Chamber was destroyed.

This created another opportunity to redesign Parliament. Winston Churchill famously argued against taking it. He wanted the Commons rebuilt in essentially its old shape, believing its intimate size and opposing benches were important to British parliamentary life. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott designed the replacement, which opened in 1950. So even the Commons Chamber seen today is not Victorian: it is a post-war reconstruction consciously preserving a spatial tradition inherited ultimately from St Stephen's Chapel.

Big Ben survived the war, although its illuminated faces and the Ayrton Light were blacked out from 1939 so they could not help enemy aircraft navigate over London. The clock became so associated with national continuity that its chimes acquired a significance far beyond telling the time, particularly through radio broadcasts.

The tower's appearance today also contains a small historical correction. During the major conservation undertaken between 2017 and 2022, researchers analysed surviving layers of Victorian paint and original drawings. They discovered that parts of the clock faces now familiar in black had originally been painted Prussian blue and gold. The restored blue detailing visible today is therefore not a modern embellishment but an attempt to recover Barry and Pugin's original scheme.

The Palace of Westminster is consequently much more complicated than the apparently ancient building on postcards. It contains an eleventh-century hall beneath a fourteenth-century roof; a parliamentary layout partly inherited from a medieval chapel; a nineteenth-century palace dressed deliberately to look older than it is; an industrial clock disguised inside a Gothic tower; and a twentieth-century Commons Chamber reconstructed after wartime destruction.

Even the skyline is deceptive. The tallest tower is not Big Ben but Victoria Tower. The elegant central spire began life as a ventilation chimney. The famous bell is cracked. The tower named for Elizabeth II acquired that name only in 2012. And the oldest, most historically remarkable structure is not the one everyone photographs from Westminster Bridge.

The Victorians were not simply rebuilding Parliament after a fire. They were designing a visual history of Britain - selecting medieval architecture to give a modern constitutional state the appearance of deep continuity. It worked almost too well.