In as long as I can remember, the great bell of the clock at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London called Big Ben imports many tourists around the world. Why has this 316 ft. high clock tower attracted attention from people around the world and is most probably the pride of people living in England? If you look from afar you could see the top of the clock tower and because of that it is considered the largest four faced chiming clock and the third tallest free standing clock tower in the world. The Big Ben has become a prominent symbol of both London and England and on the thirty-first of this coming May 2011 the clock tower will be celebrating its hundred and second anniversary since it was completed and erected on the tenth on May of 1858.

“I never worked so hard in my life for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all the designs for finishing his bell tower and it is beautiful” Those were the last written words of one of the designers of the great clock tower, Augustus Pugin before his decent into madness and death. He has written it to himself at the time of Charles Barry’s last visit to him to collect the drawings. Those designs on the clock tower later became of Barry’s design for the new Palace of Westminster since the last Palace if Westminster was burned down on the night of the sixteenth of October 1834. It was built in a Neo-Gothic style and the clock tower resembles Pugin’s designs earlier, including one for Scariscrick Hall. The tower is truly magnificent since Big Ben imports then and still so many tourists around the world. Not only is it very huge but its design is also very complex and looks sophisticated and elaborate. Like any other great architectural products, it also makes you wonder how the well-known clock tower was made or what makes it as it is. The design of the tower was celebrated in Pugin’s Gothic Revival style and the bottom 61 meters of the clock tower structure is made of brickwork with sand color Anston limestone cladding. The rest if the towers height is made with a framed spire of cast iron.

Due to the changes in ground conditions since construction, the tower leans slightly to the north-west, by roughly 8.66 inches at the clock dials, giving an inclination at approximately 1/250. Because of thermal effects it oscillates annually by a few millimetres east and west. The clock dials were also designed by Augustus Pugin and are set in an iron frame 23 ft., supporting of opal glass, rather like a stained-glass window and what surround the dials is gilded. Also at the base of each clock dial is an inscription in Latin: “DOMINE SALVAM FAC REGINAM NOSTRAM VICTORIAM PRIMAM” which translated in English would be “Oh Lord, keep safe our Queen Victoria the First” On the fifth of August 1976 was the first and only major breakdown. It was shut down for a total of 26 days over nine months and was reactivated on the ninth of May 1977. In spite of the hurdles that came to the clock tower Big Ben imports still so many people from around the world and is continually used as many of filmmakers shooting place.