Comment LONDON — The Great Bell of the Great Clock at the Palace of Westminster, known to all as “Big Ben,” is scheduled to return to full-time service on Sunday after being mostly silent for the past five years during its most ambitious renovation work ever undertaken in the damaged Parliament Buildings. At 11 a.m. on Friday, the Keeper of the Great Clock and his team of clockmakers tested the bells, and crowds gathered near Whitehall to mark Armistice Day heard the old lad chime again. Everything went well. Westminster is rotting from within “Wonderful, wonderful, it’s been a long time coming,” said Art Wallace, 56, visiting the capital with his mother from Yorkshire in northern England. At 11 a.m. on November 11, the keeper of the Great Clock tried the bells, and crowds gathered near Whitehall to commemorate Armistice Day heard the old boy pealing again. (Video: William Booth/The Washington Post) Since 2017, when the $95 million renovation project began, Elizabeth Tower and the clock face have been largely encased in scaffolding, and the 24-hour bells have fallen silent — except for ringing (with a replacement mechanism) on eve on New Year’s Day to mark Brexit and during Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in September, when it was rung 96 times, once every minute, for each year of the monarch’s long life. A few more bongs for Big Ben before the London bell falls silent But now, Big Ben is back as part of the regular soundtrack of London life. He will announce the time with the large bell and every quarter hour by striking the notes G-sharp, F-sharp, E and B. The BBC and other broadcasters carried the bells ringing live on Friday. It’s a bit of good news for Britain, the reset of its iconic clock, back to normal levels. Since the summer, three prime ministers have been playing musical chairs – Boris Johnson out. Liz Truss in; Liz Truss out; Rishi Sunak in. When the Victorian-era clock began striking in 1859, it was the largest, most accurate striking four-faced clock in the world. The sound of the deep gong has been used in a number of films and TV dramas and has been featured in over a million guest video clips. The Elizabeth Tower is one of the most recognizable architectural monuments in the world, right up there with the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids of Giza. This was Big Ben’s longest silence. In their 163 years of operation, the bells (and the hands of the clock) have been silenced or slowed down very few times – by heavy snow and freezing temperatures, as well as for short repairs and maintenance. ‘Sad, but happily sad’: Londoners fret over four years without Big Ben Big Ben served throughout World War II as a symbol of defiance against the bombing of London, known as the Blitz, even if the lights on the clock face were turned off at night to prevent the German Luftwaffe from finding the its goals. Renovating the tower and its gilded spire, the glass dials and stonework, the clock and bell mechanism in the belfry was complex and it was only after the maintenance team erected the scaffolding that they saw how badly the repairs were needed. The ironworks were rusted, the roof was leaking. The stones were crumbling, a victim of the pollution and also the black paint used around the clock, which did not allow the stonework to breathe. Cheap repairs made in the post-war 1950s made matters worse. The clock mechanism and chimes for the bells – the whole mechanism weighs 25,000 pounds – were removed and taken to the Cumbria Clock Company, clock specialists in England’s Lake District, where more than 1,000 separate parts were cleaned and repaired, Parliament’s media office said. . Over the Remembrance Day weekend, a video of poppies falling – the flower that symbolizes Britons lost in war – will be shown in the refurbished tower. Lindsay Hoyle, speaker of the House of Commons, said in a statement that the lighting would be “a fitting end to a week of remembrance in Parliament in a particularly sad and painful year”.
