Big Ben isn't actually the tower's name, though everyone calls it that. The tower is the Elizabeth Tower, Big Ben is the bell inside, and even that was nearly called Victoria. The whole muddle started because the Victorians couldn't decide whether to name their 13-ton bell after the portly Commissioner of Works, Benjamin Hall, or the bare-knuckle boxer Ben Caunt.

The tower leans 18 centimetres northwest, a tilt that began during construction when they hit London clay. Its clock faces, seven metres across, were once cleaned by men who crawled through trapdoors behind the dials, polishing from inside while London traffic roared 28 storeys below. During the Blitz, the bells kept chiming even as bombs fell, though Parliament's archivists secretly moved the clock's original drawings to a quarry in Wales.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours decode Big Ben's silences and chimes, explaining why it rang backwards in 1962, how protesters have scaled it four times, and why its timekeeping is adjusted with old penny coins stacked on the pendulum.