Tick Tock
Last Sunday, while doing a tour or Wren City churches, I was struck by the number of public clocks there were, some rather beautiful, others simply functional. Many churches have a clock integrated with the tower and others which do not, often have one attached to the side.
While I was thinking about clocks, coincidentally there was a letter in last Thursday’s Telegraph complaining about how few of our city’s clocks actually display the correct time. Certainly, this picture I took of a clock in Threadneedle Street was about one and a half hours slow, although I didn’t tarry to establish whether it was running at all.
Whom to contact to find out more about London’s public clocks? The British Horological Institute suggested Chris McKay, who has just published a book on Big Ben. Chris has a very useful web site here, and has agreed to write us something about the history of London’s public clocks in the near future.
Update: A reader, via Twitter, has brought our attention to a web site for logging stopped clocks, here.
Technical Note: If you are reading this article on its own page, you will see something below called Possibly Related Articles, which perhaps should read Almost Certainly Totally Unrelated Articles. I think this is generated by a plug-in I am using called Zemanta, which is quite handy in some respects, but a pain in this one. I shall try and vape these, please bear with me! Update: Apologies to Zemanta, it was a WordPress thing, now disabled.
I am a volunteer guide at Somerset House as well as running London Trails. There are two clocks but sadly they are not really cared for. Only one seems to work
Ken, there seems to be a solid case for Something Must be Done, probably initially in the form of a campaign of some sort. Of course, it will all boil down to one thing: Funding. But where to start, what is the scope? Central London or to include Greater London? I imagine it would be relatively easy to get widespread goodwill support from institutions and the public at large: local authorities, businesses, media etc. The trick is to convert that into real £££. London Historians would certainly back such a thing to the hilt, but there are limits to what we can do operationially at this early stage of our existance.
Very interested to hear other views on this.
Cheers, Mike.
Without wishing in the slightest way to plug my new book (Brewer’s Dictionary of London Phrase & Fable, out in paperback later this month, order it via the London Historians books page), there’s an entry in it that suggests things may have always been this way:
to agree like the clocks of London
to disagree
“It was probably some sarcastic Italian, and, perhaps, horologer, who, to describe the disagreement of persons, proverbed our nation – ‘They agree like the clocks of London!’
Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature (1824)