How tall is Big Ben (Elizabeth Tower)?

Big Ben's height: 96 meters to the top of the spire

The clock tower at the north end of the Palace of Westminster, officially Elizabeth Tower and known worldwide as Big Ben, stands 96 m (316 ft) tall. It sits on a square base about 12 m (40 ft) on each side, so the tower is eight times taller than it is wide. That slender proportion is part of what makes it one of the most recognizable buildings in the world.

The 96 m figure runs from ground level to the tip of the cast-iron spire and finial. It includes the whole stack: the brick shaft faced in limestone, the clock stage, the belfry and the steep pointed roof. This is the height used on this page and in our 3D comparison tool.

Bell, clock or tower? The naming question

The name "Big Ben" belongs to the Great Bell, the largest of the five bells in the belfry. For most of its history the building itself was simply the Clock Tower. The name "St Stephen's Tower", sometimes used by journalists, never officially applied to it. In 2012 the tower was renamed Elizabeth Tower to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, matching the Victoria Tower at the other end of the palace. Common usage hasn't changed: for most people "Big Ben" means the whole tower, bell, clock and spire, and that's how this site lists it.

Not the tallest tower at Westminster

Big Ben is the palace's most famous tower but not its tallest. The Palace of Westminster has three main towers:

The square, heavy Victoria Tower at the southwest corner tops Big Ben by about 2.5 m. It looks shorter from many viewpoints because it is much wider and lacks a slender spire. The difference is one of the clearest examples of how silhouette and height can tell different stories.

Building the tower: from the 1834 fire to 1859

The old medieval palace burned down on 16 October 1834. Westminster Hall survived, but almost everything else was lost. A design competition followed, won by Charles Barry, with Augustus Pugin creating much of the Gothic Revival detail. The clock tower is often described as one of Pugin's last major designs before his death in 1852, and its tall, gilded belfry and spire show his style clearly.

Work on the tower started in 1843 and it was completed in 1859. The structure is a load-bearing brick core faced in Anston limestone, a pale stone from South Yorkshire, with a roof clad in cast-iron tiles. Iron was a modern choice for the time and kept the roof light and fireproof.

The Great Clock: accuracy at 55 meters

The four dials are set about 55 m (180 ft) above the street, more than halfway up the tower. Each is 6.9 m (22.5 ft) across and glazed with 324 pieces of opal glass, lit from behind at night. The copper minute hands are 4.3 m long, nearly as long as a London bus is tall, and they move through about 1.5 m of dial every quarter hour.

The mechanism was designed by the lawyer and amateur horologist Edmund Beckett Denison with the Astronomer Royal George Airy, and built by Edward John Dent and his stepson Frederick Dent. Denison's key invention was the double three-legged gravity escapement, which separates the pendulum from the force of wind and snow pushing on the huge hands. He never patented it, and it became standard on large tower clocks.

The clock's rate is still fine-tuned in a famously simple way. Adding or removing a single old penny on the pendulum changes the timekeeping by about 0.4 seconds per day.

When the clock stopped

The clock has been very reliable, though not perfect. Its longest breakdown came in 1976, when a metal fatigue failure in the air brake regulator damaged the chiming mechanism. The clock was out of action for 26 days spread over nine months and restarted in May 1977. It was also stopped deliberately for about 33 hours in October 2005 for maintenance.

The Great Bell and the belfry

The belfry houses the 13.7-tonne Great Bell and four quarter bells that play the 20-note Westminster Quarters. The first Great Bell, cast in 1856, cracked during testing in the palace yard. Its replacement, cast at Whitechapel in 1858 and hauled up the tower shaft, cracked within a few months of entering service in 1859. Rather than recast it a third time, engineers turned the bell, fitted a lighter hammer, and cut a small square out of the crack's edge. The slightly off note you hear today comes partly from that old damage.

Above the belfry sits the Ayrton Light, added in 1873. It is lit whenever either House of Parliament is sitting after dark, so a glance at the top of the 96 m tower shows Londoners whether Parliament is still at work.

Comparing Big Ben with other landmarks

At 96 m, the Elizabeth Tower is almost exactly the height of the Statue of Liberty on her pedestal and a long way below London's modern skyline. You can line it up against any of these in the 3D height comparison tool.

The London Eye comparison matters if you're visiting. The wheel stands across the Thames from the palace, a short walk north along the South Bank, so passengers in a capsule at the top look down on the tip of Big Ben's spire from about 39 m above it.

A lean you can't see

Like Pisa's bell tower, Big Ben leans, but far less. Surveys show the top has moved about 230 mm to the northwest over its 55 m clock-stage height, about 1 in 240, or roughly a quarter of a degree. Ground movement from twentieth-century tunneling, including the Jubilee line extension, was monitored closely for this reason. For comparison, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was stabilized between 1993 and 2001 at about 3.97 degrees, roughly sixteen times steeper. At Big Ben the lean is a matter for survey instruments, not tourist photos.

Big Ben at human scale

The 96 m total is easier to picture when you split the tower into the parts a visitor sees.

• The shaft up to the clock stage. The dials are centered about 55 m up, so more than half the tower's height is the plain, paneled shaft below them. A 1.75 m adult would have to be stacked about 31 times to reach the center of a dial.
• The dials themselves. At 6.9 m across, each dial is taller than a two-story house. The 4.3 m minute hand alone is about two and a half times the height of an average British man of 177.5 cm (see our UK average height data). That is why the hands look slim from the street but have to be built from copper and gun metal to stay light.
• The belfry and spire. Above the dials, the open belfry, the Ayrton Light and the pointed iron roof take up the top 30 m or so. From Parliament Square this section looks much shorter than it is, because the eye is drawn to the clock.
• The 334 steps. The spiral staircase climbs inside a shaft only a few meters across. At an ordinary stair rise of 17–18 cm, 334 steps add up to roughly 57–60 m, which fits a belfry sitting just above the clock stage. It is a normal stair height repeated hundreds of times, with no elevator.

These proportions also explain why the tower looks so different from various viewpoints. From Westminster Bridge you see the full height against the sky. From the narrow streets of Whitehall, nearby buildings hide the shaft and only the clock and spire show above the rooftops.

The 2017–2021 restoration

By the 2010s the tower needed major repairs: crumbling stonework, a worn clock mechanism, leaking iron roofing and outdated services. Conservation began in 2017, and the bells were largely silenced while workers covered the tower in scaffolding to the top of the spire. The budget first stated at about £29 million rose to nearly £80 million after surveyors found wartime bomb damage, asbestos and more decay than expected.

The work brought back some original Victorian features. The dial surrounds and other ironwork were repainted in Prussian blue and gold, the scheme Barry and Pugin intended, which had been covered in black in the twentieth century. The Great Clock was taken apart and restored. The tower's height was unchanged. Regular chimes returned on Remembrance Sunday, 13 November 2022. Two months earlier, the bell had tolled once a minute for 96 minutes at Queen Elizabeth II's funeral, once for each year of her life, and, by coincidence, once for each meter of the tower named after her.

Visiting the tower

Tours of the Elizabeth Tower, organized by UK Parliament, take small groups up the 334 steps to the belfry, past the clock mechanism and behind one of the illuminated dials. There is no visitor elevator, places are limited and there are age requirements, so check the official Parliament website for current availability. From the street, the best views of the full 96 m height are from Westminster Bridge and the South Bank, near the London Eye. For other famous towers and how they compare, browse our landmarks hub.