The Big Ben, the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster in London, is leaning and its tilt is now visible to the naked eye, engineers have claimed.
Civil engineers have discovered that the clock tower at the Palace of Westminster is no longer ramrod straight and the problem is getting worse every year.
The top of the tower is now almost one-and-a-half feet off the perpendicular and if left uncorrected it would eventually fall.
It would still take four thousand years for the tower to reach the angle of Italy's famous leaning tower of Pisa and even longer to reach tipping point.
The problem has been blamed on decades of building work that have gone on around the foot of the structure - 315ft (96m) tall, with 11 storeys and 393 stairs - since it was completed in 1858.
These have ranged from a sewer built in the 1860s to the District Line the following decade and an underground car park for MPs in the 1970s.
When the Jubilee Line was extended through Westminster in the late 1990s, special techniques were used to create a concrete barrier under the tower, in a bid to secure it.
Yet a new survey for London Underground and the Parliamentary Estates Department has found that the rate of movement has accellerated in recent years.
The tower is now leaning towards the northwest at an angle of 0.26 degrees, meaning the top of the tower is 1ft 5in from vertical. John Burland, emeritus professor and senior research investigator from Imperial College London who has worked on the Big Ben tower, said: "The tilt is now just about visible. You can see it if you stand on Parliament Square and look east, towards the river."
The top of the tower is now almost one-and-a-half feet off the perpendicular and if left uncorrected it would eventually fall.
It would still take four thousand years for the tower to reach the angle of Italy's famous leaning tower of Pisa and even longer to reach tipping point.
The problem has been blamed on decades of building work that have gone on around the foot of the structure - 315ft (96m) tall, with 11 storeys and 393 stairs - since it was completed in 1858.
These have ranged from a sewer built in the 1860s to the District Line the following decade and an underground car park for MPs in the 1970s.
When the Jubilee Line was extended through Westminster in the late 1990s, special techniques were used to create a concrete barrier under the tower, in a bid to secure it.
Yet a new survey for London Underground and the Parliamentary Estates Department has found that the rate of movement has accellerated in recent years.
The tower is now leaning towards the northwest at an angle of 0.26 degrees, meaning the top of the tower is 1ft 5in from vertical. John Burland, emeritus professor and senior research investigator from Imperial College London who has worked on the Big Ben tower, said: "The tilt is now just about visible. You can see it if you stand on Parliament Square and look east, towards the river."
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