MPS discuss major repairs to leaning tower of London
LONDON — Time stands still for no one. In London, it doesn’t even stand straight.
St. Stephen’s Clock Tower, which houses the bell known as Big Ben and is perhaps the most iconic structure in all of Britain, is leaning, and the lawmakers who work in its shadow are trying to figure out what to do about it.
Members of Parliament gathered at the House of Commons on Monday to discuss a report containing some drastic solutions to deal with the problem, even though it will be thousands of years before the tower achieves the precarious slant of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Among the suggestions: temporarily relocating Parliament while costly repair work takes place on both the tower and the Palace of Westminster, where lawmakers meet; or selling the entire complex to a rich foreign developer.
Neither option is likely to be accepted in the near future. Nor is the tower expected to imminently topple over into the river that flows at its feet.
“The House of Commons authorities would be surprised if the clock tower fell into the Thames any time soon,” Thomas Docherty, a Labor Party lawmaker, was quoted as saying. But “it may well be raised with the speaker [ of the house]. Given that the tower is situated over the speaker’s apartments, he may have a view on it.”
A surveyor’s report last year revealed the top of the 100- metre tower to be about a half- metre off the vertical.
The cause remains unknown. Natural subsidence is one possibility, as the clay that lies deep beneath the tower slowly dries. There has also been tunnelling in the area in recent years to build a multi- level parking lot and to extend one of London’s Underground lines.
The structure is also known as the Clock Tower at the Palace of Westminster. Big Ben is the giant bell housed within the belfry; its stately bongs at the top of each hour are recognized the world over. The tower was completed in 1858 as part of the new Palace of Westminster, after the previous palace burned down.
“If you stand in Parliament Square [ to the west] and look toward it, you can just see it moves very slightly to the left,” John Burland, an engineering professor at Imperial College in London, was quoted as saying by the BBC.
“But I wouldn’t put any political slant on that.”