The Palace of Westminster: Fire, Genius, Blitz and Big Ben

On the night of the 16th of October 1834, the most famous parliamentary building in the world burned to the ground.

Not the building you know. Not the Gothic Revival masterpiece that faces the Thames today, its towers and pinnacles and stone tracery reflected in the river, one of the most recognisable silhouettes on earth. That building didn't exist yet. What burned in 1834 was the medieval Palace of Westminster — the ancient, rambling, combustible collection of halls and chambers and offices that had housed the English Parliament since the thirteenth century.

It burned because of wooden tally sticks.

The Exchequer had been keeping financial records on notched wooden tally sticks since the medieval period — a system so ancient and so inefficient that it had been formally abolished in 1826. By 1834 there were cartloads of old tally sticks in the basement of the Houses of Parliament, surplus to requirements, waiting to be disposed of. Someone decided to burn them in the furnaces beneath the House of Lords. Someone else decided to burn too many of them too quickly.

The furnaces overheated. The flues caught. The House of Lords caught. The House of Commons caught. By morning the medieval Palace of Westminster was a smoking ruin, the great hall of William Rufus — one of the finest medieval structures in England — barely saved by heroic firefighting, the rest gone.

Britain's parliament had burned down because someone had been too enthusiastic about burning old paperwork.

This is, genuinely, true. And it is the most British possible origin story for one of the most magnificent buildings in the world.

The Competition

The decision about what to replace the medieval palace was made quickly and with unusual wisdom for a government procurement process: the new building must be in either the Gothic or Elizabethan style, to harmonise with Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey that had survived the fire.

A competition was held. Ninety seven entries were submitted. The winner was Charles Barry — a classical architect, trained in Italy, whose previous work was almost entirely in the Italianate and Renaissance styles. Barry had proposed a Gothic building almost certainly because the competition required it rather than because it was his natural idiom.

To make it work he needed someone who actually understood Gothic architecture. He found him in Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin — a Catholic convert of extraordinary talent, obsessive energy, and volcanic temperament, who believed that Gothic architecture was not merely a style but a moral statement, the physical expression of Christian civilisation at its most complete.

Pugin was thirty when he began work on the Houses of Parliament. He was forty when he died. In the ten years between those dates he produced one of the most comprehensive and detailed decorative schemes in the history of British architecture — designing virtually every interior element of the building from the floor tiles to the wallpaper to the furniture to the door hinges to the coat hooks in the members' lobby.

He designed two thousand five hundred wallpaper patterns for the building. Two thousand five hundred. Each one different. Each one based on Gothic motifs, executed with a precision and an inventiveness that has never been surpassed in British decorative art.

He worked at an inhuman pace — designing, drawing, writing, corresponding, travelling between London and his home in Ramsgate, managing workshops producing the objects he designed, fighting with Barry over credit and control, conducting a ferocious public debate about the nature of Christian art, raising a family, converting to Catholicism, and producing a body of theoretical and practical work that transformed British architecture.

The pace killed him. The tower was designed by Augustus Pugin and Sir Charles Barry in the Perpendicular Gothic style and was completed in 1859.  Pugin died in 1852, before the clock tower that bears his most recognisable work was complete. He died in an asylum, his mind broken by overwork and possibly by the toxic materials he had worked with throughout his career.

He was forty years old. The building he designed is still standing. It will stand for centuries more.

The Building

The Palace of Westminster that Barry and Pugin created is one of the supreme achievements of Victorian Britain — and Victorian Britain was not short of supreme achievements.

It covers eight acres of ground. It contains over a thousand rooms, a hundred staircases, two miles of corridor, and eleven courtyards. It houses the House of Commons, the House of Lords, committee rooms, libraries, offices, restaurants, a post office, and the offices of several hundred Members of Parliament and their staff.

The river frontage — nearly three hundred metres of Gothic stonework facing the Thames — is one of the great urban elevations in world architecture. The Victoria Tower at the south end, where the parliamentary archives are kept, was the largest and tallest square tower in the world when it was completed in 1860. The Central Lobby, where members of the public meet their MPs, is an octagonal Gothic space of extraordinary richness, its vaulted ceiling decorated with mosaics representing the four patron saints of the United Kingdom.

Every detail matters. Every doorknob, every tile, every carved capital, every piece of stained glass was designed as part of a coherent whole — the most completely designed large building in Victorian Britain, every element subordinated to a single vision of what the home of British parliamentary democracy should look like.

It should look permanent. It should look serious. It should look like a civilisation that intended to last.

Big Ben — The Bell That Nearly Wasn't

The clock tower that rises at the north end of the palace — renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 in honour of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, though everyone still calls it Big Ben — is the most recognisable element of the building and one of the most recognisable structures in the world.

Originally named the Clock Tower, the structure was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. The name Big Ben — almost universally applied to the tower as a whole — actually belongs specifically to the great bell inside it. The tower is Elizabeth Tower. The bell is Big Ben. Almost nobody calls them by their correct names and almost everyone recognises both.

The story of Big Ben the bell is one of the great British sagas of things going wrong at enormous expense before eventually going right.

The original bell was a 16-ton hour bell, cast on 6 August 1856 in Stockton-on-Tees by John Warner and Sons.  It was transported by rail to Hartlepool — the bell was so wide that no other rail traffic could pass it on its journey. From Hartlepool it went by sea to London, where sixteen white horses drew it across Westminster Bridge to the palace. Vast crowds lined the route and cheered.

Since the tower was not yet finished, the bell was suspended in the Palace Yard for testing. It was traditional to give large bells a name before they were rung. It was decided to christen the great bell Big Ben in honour of Sir Benjamin Hall who was President of the Board of Works during the casting of the bell. 

Then it cracked. Not immediately — it was many months after the trials began, in October 1857, that it cracked.  A crack over a metre long appeared directly opposite the point of impact of the clapper. Arguments erupted over who was responsible. The bell was broken up with a wrecking ball and recast.

The Big Ben bell still in use today was recast on 10 April 1858 after the original, cast in August 1856, cracked during testing. The replacement was two and a half tons lighter than its predecessor and was winched up to the belfry — a process that took thirty hours — in October 1858.

Today — the 11th of July — is the 167th anniversary of the moment it finally rang. On July 11, 1859, Big Ben rang out for the first time. 

It cracked again in September. This time because the hammer striking it was approximately twice the weight the bell founder had specified. Big Ben fell silent for four years.

The solution was characteristically pragmatic and very British: in 1863, the great bell was turned so an undamaged portion is struck with a smaller hammer. It has been ringing ever since — the same bell, with the same crack, rotated to hide it, struck more gently, telling the time above Westminster for a hundred and sixty three years.

The clock uses its original mechanism and was the largest and most accurate four-faced striking and chiming clock in the world upon its completion. It is known for its reliability, and can be adjusted by adding or removing pre-decimal pennies to or from the pendulum. 

Pre-decimal pennies. Added to or removed from the pendulum of the most famous clock in the world. To keep it accurate. British engineering at its most practical and most magnificent simultaneously.

The tower stands 316 feet tall, and the climb from ground level to the belfry is 334 steps.  It leans slightly — about half a metre to the northwest, caused by underground works and the movement of the London clay beneath it. The lean is invisible to the naked eye and entirely stable. Big Ben is, imperceptibly, the Leaning Tower of London.

The Blitz

On the night of the 10th of May 1941 — the last major night raid of the London Blitz — the Palace of Westminster was hit by German bombs. The roof of Westminster Hall caught fire. The House of Commons chamber was destroyed entirely.

The firefighters who fought to save Westminster Hall that night made a decision — the hall first, the Commons chamber second. Westminster Hall, the ancient Norman structure that had survived the fire of 1834, that dated to 1097 and was one of the oldest and most significant buildings in Britain, was saved. The Commons chamber burned.

Churchill, surveying the damage, made a decision about the rebuilding that tells you everything about his understanding of British parliamentary democracy and the character it required.

The Commons chamber would be rebuilt exactly as it had been. Not enlarged — kept deliberately small. The chamber cannot seat all MPs simultaneously. There are not enough seats for every Member of Parliament to sit down during a major debate.

Churchill insisted this was not a design flaw but a feature. A large chamber, he argued, with seats for everyone, would feel empty on ordinary days when attendance was normal, and would sap the energy and urgency from debate. A small chamber, crowded and intimate when it mattered, created the confrontational, face-to-face, cut-and-thrust atmosphere that had produced the greatest parliamentary oratory in the world and that had held governments to account for three centuries.

He was right. The rebuilt chamber — opened in 1950, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott — preserved the intimacy and the adversarial layout that defines British parliamentary debate. Government faces opposition across a narrow central space. There is nowhere to hide. The chamber demands performance, demands argument, demands the kind of direct engagement that larger, more comfortable legislative spaces do not.

Churchill understood that the physical space shapes the political culture. He saved the culture by preserving the space.

Big Ben was damaged in the Blitz but survived. Its clock faces were cracked. Its mechanism was damaged. But the bell — the cracked, rotated, repaired, indestructible bell — kept ringing.

The Sound of Britain

The tolling of the bells is broadcast live in the UK on BBC Radio 4 and internationally on both the BBC World Service and online on BBC Sounds twice a day. 

The bongs of Big Ben — heard across London, broadcast across the world, the sound that prefaces the BBC's most important news programmes, the sound that marks New Year's midnight across the country — are perhaps the most recognisable sound Britain has ever produced.

Not a piece of music. Not a voice. A bell. Cracked, patched, rotated, struck gently by a lighter hammer than it was designed for, ringing from a tower that leans slightly to the northwest above a building that replaced one that burned down because of old paperwork — but ringing. Always ringing.

That sound is Britain. The persistence of it, the reliability of it, the way it has marked the hours above Westminster through wars and crises and celebrations and ordinary Tuesday afternoons for a hundred and sixty seven years — that is the character of a nation expressed in a single repeated note.

It rang for the first time on this day in 1859. It is ringing now.