Clock Tower, Brighton
Encyclopedia
The Clock Tower is a free-standing clock tower
Clock tower
A clock tower is a tower specifically built with one or more clock faces. Clock towers can be either freestanding or part of a church or municipal building such as a town hall. Some clock towers are not true clock towers having had their clock faces added to an already existing building...

 in the centre of Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...

, part of the English city of Brighton and Hove. Built in 1888 in commemoration of Queen Victoria's
Victoria of the United Kingdom
Victoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India....

 Golden Jubilee, the distinctive structure included innovative structural features and became a landmark in the popular and fashionable seaside resort. The city's residents "retain a nostalgic affection" for it, even though opinion is sharply divided as to the tower's architectural merit. English Heritage
English Heritage
English Heritage . is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport...

 has listed the clock tower at Grade II for its architectural and historical importance.

History

The small fishing village of Brighthelmston was transformed into a fashionable seaside resort
Seaside resort
A seaside resort is a resort, or resort town, located on the coast. Where a beach is the primary focus for tourists, it may be called a beach resort.- Overview :...

 and thriving commercial centre after local doctor Richard Russell's
Richard Russell (doctor)
Richard Russell was an 18th century British Physician who encouraged his patients to use a form of water therapy that involved the submersion or bathing in, and drinking of, seawater...

 treatise explaining the health-giving effects of drinking and bathing in seawater became a fad in the late 18th century. Royal patronage ensued—the Prince Regent (later King George IV)
George IV of the United Kingdom
George IV was the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and also of Hanover from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later...

 moved into a farmhouse which became the lavish Royal Pavilion
Royal Pavilion
The Royal Pavilion is a former royal residence located in Brighton, England. It was built in three campaigns, beginning in 1787, as a seaside retreat for George, Prince of Wales, from 1811 Prince Regent. It is often referred to as the Brighton Pavilion...

—and speculative residential and commercial development, encouraged by transport improvements, attracted large numbers of day-trippers, holidaymakers and new residents throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

By the 1780s, North Street had become established as an important shopping street, and its status as the commercial heart of Brighton grew over the next century. It first developed as a route in the 14th century, when it formed the medieval village's northern boundary, and ran from west to east from the end of the main route from London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 towards the Royal Pavilion and the seafront. West Street, the ancient western boundary of the settlement, ran southwards towards the beach and seafront; and Queen's Road was built straight through a slum area in 1845 to link the recently built railway station
Brighton railway station
Brighton railway station is the principal railway station in the city of Brighton and Hove, on the south coast of England. The station master is Mark Epsom...

 directly with the centre of Brighton. The western section of North Street was renamed Western Road in the 1830s to match the rest of that road, which was built as an access route to the high-class Brunswick Town estate
Brunswick (Hove)
Brunswick Town is an area in Hove, in the city of Brighton and Hove, England. It is best known for the Regency architecture of the Brunswick estate.-History:...

 but became the town's main shopping street by the 1860s (the remaining section of North Street was lined with offices and banks by this time).

The roads were widened in the second half of the 19th century, and by 1880 the junction of North Street, Western Road, West Street and Queen's Road was a major landmark with a small, old waiting shelter in the middle. The site was ideal for redevelopment, and in 1881 a competition was held for a replacement building. Architects Henry Branch and Thomas Simpson were recorded as the winners, but their plans were never executed and the site stood vacant until 1888.

Queen Victoria
Victoria of the United Kingdom
Victoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India....

 celebrated her Golden Jubilee
Golden Jubilee
A Golden Jubilee is a celebration held to mark a 50th anniversary.- In Thailand :King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world's longest-reigning monarch, celebrated his Golden Jubilee on 9 June 1996.- In the Commonwealth Realms :...

 in 1887, and many towns built Jubilee clock
Jubilee clock
Jubilee Clock is a term used in reference to a number of clocks constructed and erected throughout the British Empire in commemoration of the Golden or Diamond Jubilee of various British monarchs, most commonly, Queen Victoria's.-Brighton:...

 towers to commemorate the occasion. A local advertising contractor, James Willing,Some sources give his name as John Willing. decided to commission one for Brighton. He donated £2,000 and commissioned a London-based architect, John Johnson. The tower was completed at the start of 1888 and was unveiled on 20 January 1888 on Willing's 70th birthday.

Local inventor Magnus Volk
Magnus Volk
Magnus Volk was a pioneer British electrical engineer. He is most notable for having built Volk's Electric Railway, the world's oldest extant electric railway. He also built the unique, but short lived, Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway, together with its unusual Daddy Long Legs...

—responsible for Britain's oldest surviving electric railway
Volk's Electric Railway
Volk's Electric Railway is the oldest operating electric railway in the world. It is a narrow gauge railway that runs along a length of the seafront of the English seaside resort of Brighton...

, an eccentric sea-based railway line
Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway
The Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway was a unique coastline railway in Brighton, England that ran through the shallow waters of the English Channel between 1896 and 1901.-Background and Construction:...

, a pioneering electric car and Brighton's first telephone link—designed a time ball
Time ball
A time ball is a large painted wooden or metal ball that drops at a predetermined time, principally to enable sailors to check their marine chronometers from their boats offshore...

 for the clock tower soon after it opened. The hydraulically operated copper sphere moved up and down a 16 feet (4.9 m) metal mast every hour, based on electrical signals transmitted from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Royal Observatory, Greenwich
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich , in London, England played a major role in the history of astronomy and navigation, and is best known as the location of the prime meridian...

. The feature was disabled after a few years because of complaints about the noise it caused.

The tower was the focal point of several bursts of anti-Victorian sentiment in Brighton in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; as such it fulfilled a similar function to the Albert Memorial
Albert Memorial
The Albert Memorial is situated in Kensington Gardens, London, England, directly to the north of the Royal Albert Hall. It was commissioned by Queen Victoria in memory of her beloved husband, Prince Albert who died of typhoid in 1861. The memorial was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the...

 in London's Kensington Gardens
Kensington Gardens
Kensington Gardens, once the private gardens of Kensington Palace, is one of the Royal Parks of London, lying immediately to the west of Hyde Park. It is shared between the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The park covers an area of 111 hectares .The open spaces...

, which was occasionally the scene of similar local and national demonstrations.

The tower is acknowledged as one of Brighton's main landmarks (although its impact has been affected by intrusive street furniture
Street furniture
Street furniture is a collective term for objects and pieces of equipment installed on streets and roads for various purposes, including traffic barriers,...

), and it has been described as "the hub of modern Brighton". The "nostalgic affection" felt by the city's population towards the structure, and the difficulty of demolishing or removing it without great expense, have ensured its survival despite demands (occasionally vociferous) for its destruction. Criticism by architectural historians has sometimes been intense, although others have praised the tower. Nikolaus Pevsner
Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner, CBE, FBA was a German-born British scholar of history of art and, especially, of history of architecture...

 and Ian Nairn
Ian Nairn
Ian Nairn was a British architectural critic and topographer.He had no formal architecture qualifications; he was a mathematics graduate and a Royal Air Force pilot...

 dismissed it as "worthless", and it has been likened to "a giant salt-cellar"; but its idiosyncratic appeal has prompted descriptions such as "charmingly ugly" and "extremely charming and delightful", and the most recent academic study of the city's architecture acclaimed it as "supremely confident and showy".

The Clock Tower was listed at Grade II by English Heritage
English Heritage
English Heritage . is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport...

 on 26 August 1999. This status is given to "nationally important buildings of special interest". As of February 2001, it was one of 1,124 Grade II-listed buildings and structures, and 1,218 listed buildings of all grades, in the city of Brighton and Hove.

Architecture

The Clock Tower is a Classical-style
Classical architecture
Classical architecture is a mode of architecture employing vocabulary derived in part from the Greek and Roman architecture of classical antiquity, enriched by classicizing architectural practice in Europe since the Renaissance...

 structure with Baroque
Baroque architecture
Baroque architecture is a term used to describe the building style of the Baroque era, begun in late sixteenth century Italy, that took the Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical and theatrical fashion, often to express the triumph of the Catholic Church and...

 touches. It rises to 75 feet (22.9 m), and the mast for Volk's time ball adds a further 16 feet (4.9 m). The four clock faces have a diameter
Diameter
In geometry, a diameter of a circle is any straight line segment that passes through the center of the circle and whose endpoints are on the circle. The diameters are the longest chords of the circle...

 of 5 feet (1.5 m). and are inscribed on the clock faces. The square base is of pink granite
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

, as are the Corinthian
Corinthian order
The Corinthian order is one of the three principal classical orders of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The other two are the Doric and Ionic. When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, two more orders were added to the canon, the Tuscan order and the Composite order...

 columns on each shaft; the rest of the structure is of Portland stone
Portland stone
Portland stone is a limestone from the Tithonian stage of the Jurassic period quarried on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. The quarries consist of beds of white-grey limestone separated by chert beds. It has been used extensively as a building stone throughout the British Isles, notably in major...

. On each side, the tapering columns rise part way up the shaft and are topped by pediment
Pediment
A pediment is a classical architectural element consisting of the triangular section found above the horizontal structure , typically supported by columns. The gable end of the pediment is surrounded by the cornice moulding...

s with open bases, below which is elaborately carved scrollwork and a protuberance designed to resemble the gunwale
Gunwale
The gunwale is a nautical term describing the top edge of the side of a boat.Wale is the same word as the skin injury, a wheal, which, too, forms a ridge. Originally the gunwale was the "Gun ridge" on a sailing warship. This represented the strengthening wale or structural band added to the design...

 of a ship. Incised lettering on each ship indicates where they are pointing: clockwise from north, they show , , and . Below these, each side has an arched recess containing a medallion-style
Medal
A medal, or medallion, is generally a circular object that has been sculpted, molded, cast, struck, stamped, or some way rendered with an insignia, portrait, or other artistic rendering. A medal may be awarded to a person or organization as a form of recognition for athletic, military, scientific,...

 mosaic portrait of a member of the Royal Family. At the corners of the base, there are carved stone statues of female figures. Above the pediments, the rusticated
Rustication (architecture)
thumb|upright|Two different styles of rustication in the [[Palazzo Medici-Riccardi]] in [[Florence]].In classical architecture rustication is an architectural feature that contrasts in texture with the smoothly finished, squared block masonry surfaces called ashlar...

 stone walls are decorated with pilaster
Pilaster
A pilaster is a slightly-projecting column built into or applied to the face of a wall. Most commonly flattened or rectangular in form, pilasters can also take a half-round form or the shape of any type of column, including tortile....

s, narrow round-headed recesses and a frieze
Frieze
thumb|267px|Frieze of the [[Tower of the Winds]], AthensIn architecture the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Even when neither columns nor pilasters are expressed, on an astylar wall it lies upon...

 formed by enclosed baluster
Baluster
A baluster is a moulded shaft, square or of lathe-turned form, one of various forms of spindle in woodwork, made of stone or wood and sometimes of metal, standing on a unifying footing, and supporting the coping of a parapet or the handrail of a staircase. Multiplied in this way, they form a...

s. Pevsner saw Gothic
Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....

 elements in the design of this section. Above the frieze, an ornate cornice
Cornice
Cornice molding is generally any horizontal decorative molding that crowns any building or furniture element: the cornice over a door or window, for instance, or the cornice around the edge of a pedestal. A simple cornice may be formed just with a crown molding.The function of the projecting...

with turrets at each corner is topped by a dome with a copper fish-scale roof, the time ball and a weather-vane topped with James Willing's initials.
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