Though the moral fabric of Parliament is in tatters, its architecture remains an inspiration. Stephen Bayley celebrates Pugin’s crazy, magnificent clock tower
Boing. That most familiar sound is now 150 years old. Because I am fortunate enough to live near Westminster, I often hear it during solitary moments at night in the bathroom. But, like the rest of the world, I know it even better from radio. At home or abroad, its sombre, magnificent melancholy is both reassuring and — somehow — a little bit disturbing, as time passing always is. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf wrote ‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable’. In peace and war, trouble and strife, mourning and celebration, here and now, Big Ben reminds us of ourselves. Our permanence and our transitoriness.
‘Big Ben’ is, of course, not the name of that most famous clock tower, the universal symbol of London, but the name of the gigantic bell which hangs in its belfry.
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