Houses of Parliament
Clearly visible at the south end of Whitehall is one of London’s best-known monuments, the Palace of Westminster, better known as the Houses of Parliament. The city’s finest Victorian Gothic Revival building and symbol of a nation once confident of its place at the centre of the world, it’s distinguished above all by the ornate, gilded clocktower popularly known as Big Ben, after the thirteen-ton main bell that strikes the hour (and is broadcast across the world by BBC radio).
The
original medieval palace burned down in 1834, and everything you see
now – save for Westminster Hall – is the work of Charles Barry, who
created an orgy of honey-coloured pinnacles, turrets and tracery that
attempts to express national greatness through the use of Gothic and
Elizabethan styles. You get a glimpse of the eleventh-century Westminster Hall
en route to the public galleries, its huge oak hammer-beam roof making
it one of the most magnificent secular medieval halls in Europe