After five years of restoration, the famous Big Ben clocks in London once again tell the time to the people of London.
The thousands of parts that make up the clock were meticulously cleaned and restored. The cost of all the work was about 80 million pounds sterling ($67 million).
Hundreds of people gathered in August 2017 at the tower on which the mechanism is installed to listen to the twelve last beats of the largest bell – Big Ben – and five smaller ones before the long “vacation” of the famous clock. Some Londoners could not hold back their tears, as if they were saying goodbye to a part of their city.
And so on November 13, 2022 the inhabitants of the British capital again gathered under the clock to hear this ringing symbol of London at 11:00 local time. Now the carillon of small bells will again chime every quarter hour and Big Ben will chime every hour, as it did for 158 years before the restoration.
The day of Big Ben’s return was not chosen by chance. It is Remembrance Sunday (Memorial Day), following November 11, the date on which the cessation of hostilities in World War I in Europe between the Entente and the Triple Alliance was declared in 1918 “at 11 o’clock on the 11th day of the 11th month.”
In the past five years, the clock on the tower has rung using a temporary electric device on a few rare occasions, such as the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.
Mounted on the 96-meter-tall Elizabeth Tower of the Palace of Westminster, as it became officially known in 2012 to mark the 60th anniversary of Elizabeth II’s reign, the bells are protected from bats and pigeons on the outside.
Attendants approach Big Ben only in special gear that protects their ears, otherwise the ringing of the 13.7-ton bell can cause serious concussion.
It is said that in the days when the tower towered over the city, the ringing of the big bell was heard 15 miles away from London in the quiet of the night. Since then, the capital has been built up with many imposing buildings, and Big Ben can at best be heard within a block of Westminster.
During restoration work, various parts of the bells were cleaned and painted, but the bells themselves remained in place. Big Ben is so large that to remove it from the outside would have required tearing down the floors of the tower. The most difficult task during the restoration was to move the clock mechanism, made in 1859 and weighing 11.5 tons, out of the tower.
And now 28 lamps illuminate the four clock faces with a light that changes from green to white to resemble as much as possible the gas lighting of the Victorian era. And another lamp, a white one, sits above the bells and lights up, indicating that Parliament is sitting in the Palace of Westminster.
