英国大本钟加快倾斜议会大厦或沉没_BEC初级作文

英国大本钟加快倾斜议会大厦或沉没

The 96-metre tall clock tower, which houses the bell originally nicknamed Big Ben, leans about 46 cm to the left of its peak.

A construction expert who worked on the leaning tower of Pisa in Italy and a multi-storey carpark under the houses of parliament in central London, said there was nothing to worry about, and it would take 10,000 years to reach an angle of concern.

Professor John Burland of Imperial College London also said work on the underground Jubilee train line in the 1990s had not caused dramatic movement, while a spokesman for the commission said the tilt could have existed since its construction in 1859.

The lean which is just visible to the naked eye had "been there for years," Burland said.

"When I first started work on the car park it was obvious that it was leaning," he told BBC radio.

"It was probably developed at a very early stage because there's no cracking in the cladding and we think it probably leant while they were building it and before they put the cladding on.

"That was a long time ago and buildings do lean a little bit."

He also dismissed concern in the media that parliament was slipping into the Thames, while the commission's spokesman denied the walls around the palace were suffering from a particularly bad subsidence problem causing Big Ben to lean.

The current building, which houses the upper and lower chambers as well as the offices of some lawmakers, was built after its medieval predecessor was largely destroyed by fire in 1834 and has required constant maintenance.