Big Ben

The thing nearly everyone comes to photograph is not what they think it is. The tower rising 96 metres above Westminster is called the Elizabeth Tower, a name it has held only since 2012, when Parliament renamed it to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. For the previous 153 years it had been known simply as the Clock Tower. Big Ben is the great bell inside it: a 13.7-tonne casting of E-natural that first rang on 11 July 1859, cracked within two months, and has been ringing imperfectly ever since. The whole landmark is in some sense a monument to botched origins and brilliant recovery. You come expecting a symbol of British solidity and precision, and you find a cracked bell, a tilting tower, and a colour scheme that was buried for a century under black paint. This is, quietly, more interesting.

The Bell and Its Famous Failure

The first thing to understand about the crack is who caused it. The bell had been cast in Whitechapel under the supervision of Edmund Beckett Denison, a barrister-turned-horologist whose confidence exceeded his expertise in at least one important respect. Beckett had specified a striking hammer nearly twice the weight that the foundry recommended. For two months, the heavy hammer struck the rigid bell in exactly the same spot with every hour chime, and in September 1859 the bell developed a crack roughly half a metre long.

Rather than recast it a second time (there had already been one failed casting, at a foundry in Stockton-on-Tees, before Whitechapel produced this one), the engineers rotated the bell by one eighth of a turn, filed down the crack edges, and fitted a lighter hammer. That solution has held for more than 165 years. The crack gave the bell’s tone a slight dissonance, a roughness under the fundamental note that most acoustic engineers now consider part of its identity. The sound of Big Ben is, in the precise technical sense, a mistake that became irreplaceable.

The four quarter bells around the main bell are undamaged and ring out the Westminster Chimes on each quarter hour. The melody they play is borrowed from the aria “I know that my Redeemer liveth” from Handel’s Messiah, though this attribution only entered popular circulation in the 20th century and has been disputed. What is not disputed is that the full sequence, played on the quarter hour before the hours strike, is one of the more reliably moving things you can hear in a city.

The Tower Itself

Charles Barry designed the exterior and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin designed nearly everything else, including the Gothic ornamental stonework that gives the tower its particular density of detail. Pugin died in 1852, seven years before the tower was completed, having finished the drawings while confined to Bedlam psychiatric hospital. The tower was completed in 1859.

Each of the four clock faces is approximately 7 metres in diameter. Each is made up of 324 pieces of pot opal glass held in a cast iron frame, totalling 1,292 panes of glass across the tower. The numerals are not Roman numerals in the conventional sense: the number four is rendered as IIII rather than IV, a decision made for visual symmetry and balance across the face.

The tower leans. It has been leaning since at least the 1990s, though the tilt likely began earlier. The lean is 0.26 degrees to the northwest, amounting to roughly 230 millimetres of displacement at the belfry level. This is nowhere near the 4-degree tilt of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and structural engineers consider the tower safe for several thousand years at current rates. The lean was first precisely measured during the excavation for the Jubilee line extension in the 1990s, when engineers pumped grout into the London Clay beneath the foundations on 22 separate occasions between 1996 and 1997 to limit further movement. The effort successfully kept displacement to 35 millimetres during construction. You can see the tilt if you know where to look: stand on the eastern pavement of Bridge Street and sight along the vertical line of the tower against the sky. The deviation is slight but undeniable.

The Restoration and the Prussian Blue

From 2017 to 2022, the tower was enclosed in scaffolding for its most extensive restoration in 160 years, a project costing around 80 million pounds. The most visible outcome is the colour. The clock faces, which had been painted black for decades, have been restored to their original Victorian colour: Prussian blue, the pigment that Barry and Pugin specified in the original 1850s design. Restorers found the original shade preserved under successive layers of paint and matched it exactly. The gold of the ironwork frames and the white opal glass now contrast against that deep blue, which is the correct, historically accurate appearance of the clock faces.

The mechanical systems were modernised, 700 pieces of defective stonework were replaced, and energy-efficient LED lighting was installed behind the clock faces. The hands themselves were stripped, restored off-site, and repainted to match the Prussian blue. The bells were silent for most of the restoration period, ringing only for significant national occasions by special arrangement. The clock resumed full operation in 2022. If you only have photographs of the tower from before 2019, when the first restored face was revealed, you have not seen what the tower actually looks like now.

The Ayrton Light

High on the tower, above the belfry, is a lantern that most people passing below never notice. This is the Ayrton Light, installed in 1885. It shines whenever either House of Parliament is sitting after dark.

The light was installed at the request of Queen Victoria, who wanted to be able to look out from Buckingham Palace and see whether Parliament was still in session. The view from the palace to Westminster is clear enough that a light at that height would be visible. It was named after Acton Smee Ayrton, a Liberal politician who served as First Commissioner of Works in the early 1870s. The original lamp ran on gas jets; it was converted to electricity in 1903.

The light remains in use. On late evenings when Parliament is sitting, if you look up at the tower and see the lantern glowing, Members of Parliament are still at work beneath you. It is a functioning signal, operating in the 21st century on a logic that was established for Victorian royal convenience. The Speaker of the House of Commons switched it on in April 2025 to mark a parliamentary anniversary. Most tourists do not know it exists. Look for it after dark.

Getting Up the Tower

Tours of the Elizabeth Tower are the only way to reach the belfry and stand in the same space as Big Ben. They require climbing 334 steps on a narrow spiral staircase with no lift and no exceptions: if you cannot manage the stairs, you cannot take the tour. Children under 11 are not admitted. Visitors with vertigo should consider whether the close quarters of the upper sections are manageable.

The tour lasts 90 minutes and is guided throughout. You will pass the clock mechanism on the way up, see the pendulum that keeps the movement accurate (a stack of old pennies on the pendulum bob adjusts the timekeeping, adding or removing pennies to gain or lose fractions of a second per day), and emerge into the belfry itself. Ear defenders are provided and should be worn. When the bells strike next to you, the vibration is physical as much as sonic.

The key distinction in access is residency. UK residents can request a free tour through their Member of Parliament. MPs receive an allocation of tickets at the start of each month, before the public release window opens, for their constituents. Contact your MP’s office directly and ask; allocations are limited, but this route bypasses the most competitive public booking rush. For visitors from outside the UK, public tickets cost 55 pounds for adults and 35 pounds for those aged 11 to 17. Tickets for tours from August 2026 onwards are priced at these rates; earlier in the year may differ.

Public tickets are released once a month: on the second Wednesday of each month at 10am London time, a three-month window of availability opens. They sell out within minutes. Set a calendar reminder for the second Wednesday of whichever month falls three months before your trip. Do not attempt to book at any other time. If you miss the release window, the Parliament website maintains a returns board where cancelled tickets occasionally reappear in the weeks before a tour date.

The climb is worth doing if you can book it. The London panorama from the belfry level is extensive, the mechanism is fascinating, and the experience of standing next to a 13-tonne bell that has been marking time for 165 years is something that photographs do not adequately convey.

Where to View It for Free

The inside is restricted. The outside is not, and the views around Westminster are among the better free hours available in London.

Westminster Bridge, completed in 1862, gives the classic angle: mid-bridge, looking northeast. The tower frames cleanly above the road and the river runs in the foreground. This is the photograph most people make. If you want something less saturated with other photographers, walk the 200 metres south to the riverside gardens of St Thomas’ Hospital on the Albert Embankment. The garden fronts directly onto the Thames and the view west to the tower is completely unobstructed. There is a fountain in the foreground that drops out of frame at the right distance. Early mornings before 9am, the gardens are nearly empty and the light hits the south face of the tower well. This is the spot that most visitors do not find, partly because it requires crossing the river, partly because hospitals do not market themselves as photo locations.

For the best light overall, late afternoon is more reliably rewarding than morning on the Westminster side, since the low sun catches the western face and the gold of the clock ironwork reads at its best. Early morning gives softer quality and dramatically fewer people on the bridge, which is worth something on a summer weekend when the bridge can be dense with tourists by 9am.

The Jubilee Walkway along the South Bank between Westminster Bridge and Hungerford Bridge offers sustained views of the tower over the water, particularly from the stretch in front of the former County Hall. The tower is also visible from several points along Waterloo Bridge further upstream. None of these views cost anything.

The Neighbourhood

Westminster compresses a remarkable amount of history into a small walkable area. The three natural pairings with Elizabeth Tower are Westminster Abbey, Churchill War Rooms, and Parliament Square itself.

Westminster Abbey is a ten-minute walk west. The building has served as coronation church since William the Conqueror in 1066, a run of almost exactly a thousand years. The accumulated detail inside, the Poets’ Corner, the Coronation Chair, the royal tombs, the medieval chapter house, rewards two hours of attention and receives considerably less than that from most visitors who treat it as a thirty-minute checkbox. Timed entry tickets are required and should be booked in advance; adult admission is around 25 pounds.

Churchill War Rooms, on King Charles Street five minutes’ walk north of the bridge, are the underground Cabinet War Rooms used by Churchill and his war cabinet from 1940 to 1945. The Map Room, where staff worked continuously for five years and where the pins still mark positions on the wall charts, is preserved exactly as it was on the last day of the war. The adjacent Churchill Museum covers his life in more detail than most visitors expect. Allow at least two hours; less than that and you are rushing through the most compelling section. Entry is around 30 pounds for adults, and the Imperial War Museum’s membership covers it.

The combination that works best logistically is the Abbey in the morning (it opens at 9:30am and the crowds build quickly), Churchill War Rooms in the early afternoon, and Elizabeth Tower from outside in the late afternoon when the light is right. This is a full day and a genuinely excellent one.

Parliament Square, the open space in front of the tower, is worth a few minutes even if only to note that the green was once used as a car park. The statues here include Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Abraham Lincoln, a congregation of figures who had varying relationships with the institution behind them.

Getting There

Westminster is the obvious Tube station: Circle, District, and Jubilee lines all stop there. The Jubilee line exit brings you up onto Bridge Street with the tower immediately in view. Avoid the Victoria line station of the same name on another day; they are different stations. If you are coming from the South Bank, Waterloo is served by the Jubilee, Northern, and Bakerloo lines and is a nine-minute walk across Waterloo Bridge or Westminster Bridge.

Westminster station is unusual in that the engineering depth required during the Jubilee line extension in the 1990s forced engineers to install horizontal steel tubes around and beneath the clock tower’s foundations, only 34 metres from the station box edge, to prevent the excavation from destabilising the tower. This is why the Jubilee line platforms are at extraordinary depth. You ride an escalator considerably longer than the standard to reach them. What you are passing through is the engineering solution to the problem of digging a railway under a 165-year-old 96-metre tower on soft clay.

Eating Near Westminster

The area within sight of Elizabeth Tower is not where you come for good food. The streets immediately around Parliament Square serve institutional coffee and overpriced sandwiches to tourists who have not thought ahead. Two minutes of walking changes the situation materially.

The Regency Cafe, on Regency Street in Pimlico (roughly a ten-minute walk southwest), is one of the better surviving examples of postwar London cafe culture. It opened in 1946, has an Art Deco tiled exterior, and has been used as a film set for Layer Cake, Brighton Rock, and Rocketman. The full breakfast, with fried eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, tomatoes, and tea, runs to around seven or eight pounds. The ordering system requires you to shout your number when it is called from the counter, which either endears itself to you immediately or does not. Go before 10am on a weekday when it is primarily builders and civil servants rather than tourists who have read the same articles.

If you want lunch in the area, the food stalls at Strutton Ground, a pedestrianised street ten minutes’ walk southwest of the station, offer a range of options at reasonable prices on weekdays. The market operates only at lunchtime on weekdays and caters primarily to local office workers, which is the best possible indicator of value. It is not the destination; it is the option that means you are not paying nine pounds for a pre-packaged sandwich from a chain.

For an early evening meal near the river, the Old Queen Street Cafe operates as a proper brasserie and is run with more care than the tourist-facing establishments along Whitehall. The Cellar Kitchen and Bar, also near Whitehall, does modern British cooking with seasonal ingredients without the noise and chaos of places designed around tourist throughput.

Where to Stay

The question of where to stay near Westminster depends partly on whether you have booked a tower tour. If you have, and you want the luxury of walking to it, the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge on the south side of the river positions you directly in front of the tower and on the South Bank simultaneously. Some rooms face the tower. Rates are mid-to-upper range by London standards.

For more honest pricing, the Hub by Premier Inn on Victoria Embankment is compact, reliable, and priced without pretension. It sits on the north bank a few minutes’ walk from the bridge. The honest case for it is that London’s Tube network is efficient enough that location premium matters less than it does in most cities. You can stay in Southwark, Bermondsey, or Elephant and Castle, pay considerably less, and be at Westminster in eight minutes. The Jubilee line is fast and the night tube runs on it.

Staying on the South Bank, in hotels along the Albert Embankment or near Waterloo, gives you the evening view of the illuminated tower from your side of the river. This is not nothing. The tower lit at night over the Thames is a sight that has caused people to pause and stand still on a cold evening. After you have climbed it, or studied its details, or simply understood what the cracked bell and the Prussian blue and the leaning foundations add up to, that view carries more weight than it did before.

The single most useful practical tip: if you want the tower tour, the second Wednesday of the month at 10am is the only moment that matters. Set the reminder now, not the week before your trip. Everything else about the visit can be arranged on the day, but the 334 steps require booking.