Leaning Tower of Big Ben worries MP's

eddie Thu Jan 26, 2012 5:02 pm

Leaning tower of Big Ben worries MPs

House of Commons commission meets to discuss what can be done to shore up crumbling Palace of Westminster

Sam Jones and agencies

guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 January 2012 11.09 GMT

Leaning Tower of Big Ben worries MP's Houses-of-Parliament-007

Big Ben's bell tower leans 46cm at its peak. Photograph: Alamy

Once again, the splits and misalignments are beginning to show in the mother of all parliaments.

This time, though, it is not a bickering coalition or a cabinet riven with discord that is causing concern but rather the state of the Palace of Westminster itself.

A committee of MPs will meet on Monday to see what can be done to stop the tower that houses Big Ben leaning any further and to shore up Pugin and Barry's neo-gothic edifice.

Subsidence has led to cracks appearing in walls around the Houses of Commons and Lords, with Big Ben's bell tower leaning 46cm (18in) at its peak.

The House of Commons commission – which is responsible for the upkeep of the parliamentary estate – will discuss a surveyor's report that suggests options for dealing with the problems, including repairs which may lead to peers and MPs temporarily moving out.

However, experts have dismissed suggestions that the palace could be reclaimed by the Thames.

According to Prof John Burland of Imperial College London, who designed the five-storey car park underneath the Palace of Westminster, the clock tower's tilt is nothing new.

"[It's] been there for years," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "When I first started work on the car park it was obvious that it was leaning.

"We made measurements on it. It was leaning at one in 250 to the vertical, which is just about visible. That's the break point between looking vertical and looking like a slight lean."

Burland said the lean had probably developed early on as there was no cracking in the cladding.

"We think it probably leant while they were building it and before they put the cladding on," he said. "That was a long time ago and buildings do lean a little bit."

Burland added that the cracking, which he said was not caused by the tube's Jubilee line or the car park, was actually good for the palace.

"They're beneficial because the building moves thermally more than is caused by the Jubilee line and the movements concentrated around the cracks and, if they didn't, there would be cracking elsewhere," he told Today.

He also said the clock tower's lean was visible to the naked eye: "If you stand in Parliament Square and look towards it, you can just see that it moves very slightly to the left – but I wouldn't put any political slant on that."