Caroline Shenton

Archivist, historian and writer

The Silence of the Bells

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The restoration work to Big Ben and the Clock Tower of the Houses of Parliament, which began last Monday will take for four years to complete and has provoked a flurry of media interest because of the pearl-clutching response of some MPs to the news. Here’s a piece I wrote for the Guardian about it.

There has also been coverage of my comments on the restoration at Westminster by Gavin Stamp for Apollo Magazine, on CBC News, and I was interviewed by Andrew Bomford for a feature on Big Ben for the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 (feature begins 51:00 minutes in).

All of this feels a bit odd, as I’m still getting used to commentating freely on Parliamentary news after 23 years of having to remain silent myself…

About Caroline Shenton

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it 'microhistory at its absolute best' while Dan Jones considered it 'glorious'. Its acclaimed sequel, Mr Barryís War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as 'a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful'. During 2017 Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone's Library.