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Young World
When bells will not toll
SUBAJAYANTHI B
Photo: AFP.
Silence: The famed bell has a clean-up.
Big Ben has fallen silent as workers have begun a month of maintenance work on the clock and its world-famous bell. The clocks hands were wound as a team of specialist “industrial rope-access technicians” descended to clean the clock’s four latticework faces, part of maintenance ahead of its 150th anniversary in 2009. The famed bell that sounds the hour at Britain’s Houses of Parliament will be silent for four to six weeks as engineers replace bear
ings in the clock mechanism. This is the first time since 1956 that both Big Ben’s sonorous hourly bongs and the chimes that mark each quarter-hour will be silent, robbing London of one of its most distinctive sounds. Parliament’s neo-Gothic clock tower, designed by Charles Barry, is popularly known as Big Ben, although the name refers only to the 13.5 ton Great Bell inside. Cast at the Whitechapel Foundry in east London, Big Ben first rang out in July 1859.
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