That's largest by diameter.
That's 'going back' as in counting down from 5 to 1.
I've based this on the Wikipedia page 'List of largest clock faces' (so if that's wrong, this is wrong)
See if you can guess what's coming up...
5) Manchester Town Hall Diameter of clockface: 4.8m Area of clockface: 18.1m² Length of hands: 2.4m/1.8m Number of clockfaces: 4 First operated: New Year's Day 1879
Manchester's TownHall is peak gothic Victoriana, although the Queen refused to turn up and open it so the city's mayor Abel Heywood officiated instead. The clocktower is a sandstone upthrust with an ornate spire topped off by a gold orb which sits 85m above Albert Square. And the clock itself was made in London, or what's now London but was then Surrey, in the Gillett and Bland factory off Whitehorse Road in Thornton Heath. Look for the self-storage facility behind the former Olde Clocktower pub if you want to pay a pilgrimage. The Town Hall tower contains 23 bells, the largest of which weighs 8 tons and is named Great Abel, for reasons hinted at earlier in this paragraph. As for the clockfaces, Britain's fifth largest, they're made from Polish glass and bear the inscription 'Teach us to number our Days' (taken from Psalm 90 verse 12).
Sorry the photo's poor but it's the only one I've got, taken on a gloomy day in 2016 when the Town Hall was marooned behind major roadworks in readiness for a tram extension. But you won't get a better photo at the moment because the entire building's currently under white plastic sheeting as part of a significant (and significantly over-running) restoration project, so it'll have to do. Manchester City Council have uploaded 25 mighty fine photos of the clocktower to Flickr here.
4) Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower Diameter of clockface: 5.25m Area of clockface: 21.6m² Length of hands: 3.0m/1.8m Number of clockfaces: 4 First operated: 1908
We're in Birmingham for this one, in case you weren't sure, specifically on the Edgbaston campus at the University of Birmingham. The founders always wanted a clocktower as its centrepiece but funds ran out and had to be raised separately by the university's first Chancellor, Joseph Chamberlain. He based the design on the Torre del Mangia in Siena, a medieval Italian campanile, but with the clockfaces near the top rather than near the bottom. Birmingham's version is still the world's tallest free-standing clock tower, and at 100m was also the tallest building in the city until 1965 when the Post Office Tower overtook it. The clock is by JB Joyce & Co of Shropshire, the hands are made from sheet copper and the heaviest bell weighs over 6 tons. And the whole caboodle, which also houses nesting peregrine falcons, is affectionately known by generations of students as Old Joe.
Sorry, the photo makes it look like the tower's part of the adjacent building instead of separate and slender, but it's hard to get a good shot of something this tall from directly underneath. You can see a better photo and watch a 3 minute video on Old Joe's bespoke page on the University of Birmingham website, plus @oldjoeclock is on Twitter and posts a lot of selfies (the most recent with a bright purple face to celebrate Postural Tachycardia Syndrome Awareness Day on Thursday).
3) Elizabeth Tower Diameter of clockface: 7.0m Area of clockface: 38.5m² Length of hands: 4.3m/2.7m Number of clockfaces: 4 First bonged: Monday 11th July 1859
That's Big Ben to most people, and the Clock Tower to pedants who failed to notice the name-change for the late Queen's Diamond Jubilee. You might have been expecting it to crop up later in the countdown but no, despite having a massive diameter it's only third on the UK's clockface list. I won't drone on about the Elizabeth Tower, it's all terribly familiar, plus I wrote a special 150th anniversary post back in 2009. But if I were writing more I'd likely have mentioned the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the 334 steps, the double three-legged gravity escapement, the Ayrton Light and the fact that each clock face is made up of 312 pieces of opal glass.
I have far too many photos of the clock tower - most tourists do - but not many good ones showing the frame and hands restored to Prussian Blue following the recent major restoration. This photo was taken yesterday morning amid the crowd of tourists massing on Westminster Bridge, each jockeying to get Pugin's erection in the perfect spot behind their grinning face. I'm quite chuffed to have got an aeroplane instead.
2) Royal Liver Building Diameter of clockface: 7.6m Area of clockface: 45.3m² Length of hands: 4.3m/??m Number of clockfaces: 4 First operated: 22nd June 1911 at 1.40pm
The runner-up clockface is in Liverpool atop perhaps its most iconic landmark, the Royal Liver Building, a twin-towered bulwark on the Pier Head. It was originally built as the head office of an insurance company, the Royal Liver Assurance group, and forms part of the 'Three Graces' along with the Cunard Building and Port of Liverpool Building. Three of its clockfaces are on the tower at the Mersey end while the other faces the wider city. Because the mechanism first whirred into action at the precise moment of the Coronation in 1911 they're sometimes known as the George Clocks. All are numeral-free. The real stars here are of course Bella and Bertie, aka the Liver Birds, two copper cormorants firmly chained to their domes lest they blow away and bring bad luck to the city. Each is taller than a minute hand and has a wingspan wider than a dial.
Sorry there's a halfmast flag in my photo, indeed there are two, but that's because Cilla Black was laid to rest on that particular day in August 2015 and the city was taking it very seriously. A much better view is now available looking up from the 10th floor of the Liver Building as part of an immersive experiential tour, but not from the 15th floor because that's immediately above the clockface so you have to stare out across the former World Heritage Site instead.
1) Shell Mex House Diameter of clockface: 7.62m Area of clockface: 45.6m² Length of hands: ??m/??m Number of clockfaces: 2 First operated: 1932
London takes the clockface crown by the narrowest margin, barely an inch, at the youngest building on the list. This is Shell Mex House, necessitated by the merger of Royal Dutch Shell and the British Petroleum Company, and is today known as 80 Strand because officefolk have no sense of history. It was built on the site of the Hotel Cecil, once Europe's largest hotel, and faces the River Thames across Victoria Embankment Gardens. The architecture is full-on symmetrical art deco, fronted with gleaming Portland stone and topped by a squat buttressed clocktower. The clockface isn't particularly decorative, being little more than twelve black blobs stuck to the wall in a circle, but it does have a simple charm. Its innards were also built in Thornton Heath, now by Gillett & Johnston, and as a giant oil company clock it soon earned the nickname 'Big Benzene'.
Sorry I can't tell you how long the hands are, this being the least-well-documented of Britain's largest clocks. Also my sincere apologies that I can't bring you a rare shot of the clockface from directly underneath. I was once invited to an event on the 10th floor where I was delighted to find doors that led out onto a small Thames-facing balcony immediately under the clock, but alas these were the days before phones routinely came with cameras. My close-up encounter with the very big hands impressed, but even better was the panorama up and down the river because Shell Mex House is perfectly located on the outside of a right-angled bend. Britain's biggest clockface, it turns out, has the finest view of all.
