The Big Ben is leaning!

The Big Ben, the iconic clock tower of the Palace of Westminster in London, is leaning and its tilt is now visible to the naked eye and is is getting worse every year, engineers have claimed.

The Big Ben, the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster in London, is leaning and its tilt is now visible to the naked eye, engineers have claimed. In fact, they claim to have found that the world's largest four-faced chiming clock at the British Parliament has developed a tilt which is getting worse every year, leading newspaper 'The Sunday Telegraph' reported.

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The top of the tower is now almost one-and-a-half feet off the perpendicular -- and the experts say that if the movement continues uncorrected, Big Ben would one day topple. But, breathe easy. At its current speed, it would take some 4,000 years to reach the angle of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and even longer to hit tipping-point, say the engineers. They believe that the tower is gradually "sinking" or settling into the land on which it is built. But the pattern is uneven, with the sinking occurring more quickly on the north side than the south. The problem has been blamed on decades of building work that have gone on around the foot of the structure -- 315 ft tall, with 11 storeys and 393 stairs -- since it was completed in 1858.