Top 5

Snipe Top 5: Gorgeous London clocks

Mike Pollitt | Wednesday 20 October, 2010 09:47

Check out these five beautiful clocks which can be found in public places around London. Time waits for no man, but you can at least console yourself with some cool designs as you feel it slipping through your fingers.

Jubilee Clock, Harlesden
One of many clocks erected around the Empire in 1887/8 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. The Harlesden clock seems dainty and vulnerable amid the busy road junction which has grown up around it. What was intended to be magnificent has become something rather cute. Other examples of Jubilee clocks from around the Empire here – some of them are absolutely hideous.






Moorfields Eye Hospital
Deeply cool. This clock is shaped like an eye, at an eye hospital. It’s so apt! Commissioned in 1999 to mark the Queen’s visit to the hospital, which goes to show that there are some good reasons for retaining the monarchy.






Waterloo Station
Already famous of course, but Snipe doesn’t compile these Top 5s to be contrary. This clock is included for all the times that people have stood below it, hopeful and nervous, waiting for their lover to return. A good contender for the the most romantic object in London. Amazing that Richard Curtis hasn’t ruined it yet by employing in the finale of a gushy rom-com.

St Dunstan-on-the-West Church
The first public clock in London to have a minute hand when it was put up in 1671. Two giants batter out the quarter hour bells with a couple of clubs. Great stuff. Loads of fascinating history here and here, including that the church escaped the Great Fire of London by the skin of its teeth and that Pepys was an occasional worshipper (see this Top 5 for more on that ubiquitous little chap).








Newgate Street Clock
This modern clock (erected (do you erect a clock? Don’t answer that) in 2007) has its own horribly designed website which declares, with less than total confidence: “Almost certainly the only public clock in the world with a wandering hour dial”. What the flip is a wandering hour dial? It’s a surprisingly lovely mechanism whereby the hour symbol rises and sets above the minutes like a sun. Hard to describe, strangely satisfying to apprehend.

Bonus Random Fact For Clockophiles
18th century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had the idea for a floral clock made out of a garden of living flowers. He reasoned that it would be possible to tell the time depending on which flowers were open at a certain moment and which closed (details here). Isn’t that a cool idea? It didn’t work though, because it’s bonkers.

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