The landmark clock tower containing Big Ben at Britain's Palace of Westminster starts to tilt. Media reports last week said the mother of all parliaments began its slippy slope toward the River Thames, raising fears over its future.
The House of Commons Commission met last week to discuss the responsibility for the upkeep of the 19th century neo-Gothic parliamentary estate, so popular with tourist photographers.Media reports said the commission would discuss a surveyor's report which could recommend lawmakers move out for repairs costing up to one billion pounds. The Daily Telegraph said another proposal might mean selling the maintenance to Russian or Chinese developers for about 500 million pounds (£779.7 million).
But a commission spokesman said that no surveyor's report took place, and members met only to discuss setting up a group to look at general long-term renovation of the grade 1-listed building designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin.
“I think there's been twos and twos added together and {what they've} come up with {is that } we are selling to the Russians, but they won't be talking about anything like that,” the spokesman said.
The 96-metre tall clock tower, which houses the bell originally nicknamed Big Ben, leans about 46 cm to the left of its peak.
A construction expert, who worked on the leaning tower of Pisa in Italy and a multi-storey carpark under the houses of parliament in central London, said that people should not worry as it would take 10,000 years for the building to reach an angle of concern.
Professor John Burland of Imperial College London also said work on the underground Jubilee train line in the 1990s did not cause dramatic movement, while a spokesman for the commission said the tilt could come from the origin of its construction in 1859.
The lean, slightly visible to the naked eye, “had been there for years,” Burland said.
“When I first started work on the car park it was obvious that it was leaning,” he told BBC radio.
“It was probably developed at a very early stage because there's no cracking in the cladding and we think it probably leant while they were building it and before they put the cladding on,
“That was a long time ago and buildings do lean a little bit,” he said.
He also dismissed concern in the media that parliament should also slip into the Thames, while the commission's spokesman denied the walls around the palace suffer from a particularly bad subsidence problem causing Big Ben to lean.
The current building, built after its medieval predecessor, which houses the upper and lower chambers as well as the offices of some lawmakers, got largely destroyed by fire in 1834 and requires constant maintenance.
“There's no such thing as an old building that isn't cracked,” Burland maintained.
SOURCE:
NB. Should House of Commons Commission sell maintenance of Big Ben to Russian or Chinese developers?
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