Frances Wilson:

Welcome to the sound of silence. As of noon next Monday, the lives of Londoners will no longer be punctuated by the bongs of Westminster. Those 10 ominous strokes which herald ITN’S News at Ten will seem incongruous not apt. For Big Ben (the clock and tower to which that great bell’s name has spread), is due for repair and the tolling will cease for the next four years. The builders are certainly taking their time about it.

Big Ben has been silenced before, of course: to protect Parliament from German Zeppelins (in case the bombers could hear the bells); for the funerals of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher; for brief periods of maintenance work. But on this occasion it’s as if the city were having

A totem of Britishness, Big Ben also serves as our cultural memory

a heart transplant. While surgeons tinker away at the pulmonary arteries, we are left staring at a monitor that is flatlining.

Big Ben, as his name suggests, is less a giant grandfather clock than a living thing with a heart, voice, face (four, in fact) and hands (walked across, you remember, by Peter Pan and Wendy). Playful and charming, like a child’s drawing of a clock tower, he is also as doughty as Victoria and unflinching as the Queen Mother. Never having failed us, he kept ticking throughout the Blitz, even after a bomb went right through his tower and the glass on his southern clock face was shattered.

A totem of Britishness, Big Ben also serves as a cultural touchstone. There he is in Thunderball, the fourth Bond film, when the government arranges for him to chime seven times at 6pm to show SPECTRE that a ransom of £100 million will be paid. Or think of that other memorable role, in Virginia Woolf ’s novel

Mrs Dalloway, where he announces the half-hours “with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that”.

Not so inconsiderate, though, on Remembrance Sunday, where his solemn tone marks the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. As they should, the bongs will return each November to honour the dead, even during these years of silence. The same goes for New Year’s Eve, so we will not have to welcome in the dawns of 2018-21 with Radio 4’s pips, or recordings of birdsong.

But Big Ben will no longer provide the soundtrack or the rhythm of our capital city. No more will we hear him pealing out, faultlessly, his four quarter bells: G sharp, F sharp, E and B– a variation of violin phrases from an aria in Handel’s Messiah (“I Know that my Redeemer Liveth’), the words of which allude to Psalm 37: “Lord through this hour/ Be Thou our guide/ And by Thy power / No foot shall slide.”

That voice of Big Ben – all 118 decibels of it – should be inexorable and absolute, a memento mori as familiar as the skull in a Renaissance portrait. It’s hard to believe it actually can be hushed.

So is it really necessary to stop this young man’s pulse for the next four years? Would an injection of cash not speed up the proceedings? Big Ben is, after all, the sound of London, the symbol of our national democracy. Can we not come up with another plan – while there’s still time? READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion