big ben

Big Ben, the Clock, and the Empire That Still Refuses to Admit It’s Over
By Our Man in London (still pretending the Wi-Fi works)

LONDON—On any given day, a thin queue of tourists from Wuhan to Wichita shuffles across Westminster Bridge, selfie sticks raised like incense to a minor deity. Their target: the 96-metre Victorian wedding cake officially named Elizabeth Tower but universally misidentified as “Big Ben,” a mistake the British press no longer bothers correcting. After all, when a nation’s global brand is built on marketing errors (see: “English breakfast tea,” which is Chinese leaves with a Cockney accent), why start now?

The tower has just emerged from a £80 million, five-year spa treatment—scaffolding, lead paint, a discreet facelift paid for by a Treasury that simultaneously can’t find cash for school lunches. The clock faces are once again that iconic shade of Imperial Anxiety Blue, the sort of hue that reassures tourists democracy is merely napping, not actually on life support. Inside, a new lift ferries MPs to the belfry, sparing them the 334-step climb that once tested the lung capacity of democracy’s lesser specimens. Progress, apparently, is measured in how little one has to sweat for symbolism.

Globally, the refurbished tower functions as a gilded snooze button for a planet increasingly unsure what time it is. When the bells rang out on New Year’s Eve, livestreamed to 180 countries, they offered a comforting fiction: that Greenwich still dictates the hour for everyone else, that the sun, like polite foreign policy, will always set on British terms. In reality, Tokyo traders now yawn through London’s opening bell, and Silicon Valley has decided time is whatever four guys in Patagonia vests say it is. Big Ben is less the master clock than the grandfather clock in the attic—impressive, loud, and largely decorative.

Yet symbolism dies harder than empires. In Kyiv, a radio host played the chimes as a nightly reminder that someone, somewhere, still believes in punctuality. In Lagos, counterfeit Big Ben keyrings sell faster than electricity. Even Beijing, never one to miss a branding opportunity, has built its own 1:1 replica in a theme park between a rollercoaster and a fake Venice, because nothing says cultural confidence like photocopying someone else’s nostalgia.

Back in Westminster, the tower’s renovation coincides with the UK’s parallel refurbishment of its international image—Brexit in the rear-view mirror, “Global Britain” on the bumper sticker, and absolutely no idea where the sat-nav is taking us. The scaffolding has come down just in time for a coronation, a cost-of-living crisis, and the slow realization that the Commonwealth is mostly interested in trade deals, not tea towels. The bells will toll for Charles III the same way they tolled for his mother: on time, in tune, and with the polite fiction that monarchy and democracy make excellent flatmates.

Meanwhile, the rest of the planet checks its phone. The atomic clocks on GPS satellites—American, Russian, Chinese, European—synchronize every financial transaction, missile launch, and Instagram story. Against this silent celestial precision, Big Ben’s four-faced anachronism is charmingly obsolete, like a barrister’s wig made of fibre optic. Yet we still tune in, half-hoping the old brass might tell us something our push notifications won’t: that history can be wound back, that mistakes can be un-made at the top of the hour.

Spoiler: it can’t. The belfry houses a new energy-efficient mechanism, LED lighting, and a gender-neutral toilet—modernity’s consolation prizes. But the bells remain tuned to the same 1859 key of E-major, a sound composed when Britain owned the oceans and cholera was a lifestyle. Every 15 minutes they remind Londoners that time, like empire, is mostly a story you agree to keep telling.

So the tourists keep coming, umbrellas up, currencies down, photographing a tower that’s less a timepiece than a tombstone with a functioning snooze alarm. Somewhere in the gift shop, a snow globe sells for £14.99, plastic flakes swirling around a miniature Elizabeth Tower while the real one stands above, ticking toward its next renovation, its next century, its next delusion that the world still sets its watch by London fog.

The bell tolls. We hit snooze. Repeat until insolvency.