Data Insights
Explore patterns, topics, and connections across our collection of stopped clocks through data analysis and visualisation
Topic Clusters
We've grouped the clocks by what they have in common - similar architecture, locations, or heritage status
We have 243 records of stopped clocks across Britain. These clocks, frozen in time, reflect changes in civic life through the Thatcher years, Blair and Brown's governance, and the Coalition's austerity measures. They're markers of policy decisions that played out at the local level—every stopped hand pointing to a moment when maintenance budgets were cut or priorities shifted.
The clocks range from a rural steading in Angus to grand Cotswold churches. The data shows clear patterns of how austerity and neglect affected public spaces. Each stopped clock represents a specific moment when someone decided that keeping it running wasn't worth the cost—a small decision that reflected larger pressures on local government funding.
Geographic Distribution
Explore where stopped clocks are located across the UK
Tag Network
So many blue dots! Each one is a tag we've used to describe the clocks. Click any tag to see which clocks share it, or use the slider below to filter by how many connections each tag has.
Freedom of Information Analysis
Through 308 FOI requests to UK councils, we've uncovered how 45 years of policy systematically fragmented public clock infrastructure. The data reveals a 2.1:1 privatisation ratio and an 83.5% accountability gap—most stopped clocks now sit in buildings where FOI law can't reach.
Featured Stories
Five clocks, five regions, one systemic pattern. Each story connects a specific building to the broader policy failures that let it fall silent.
Four Decades of Disinvestment
Scroll through the four political periods that transformed how the UK maintains civic infrastructure.
The Great Disposal
1979-1990
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher reclassified civic heritage as 'discretionary spending'—code for first to cut. By 1986, six metropolitan councils were abolished entirely, transferring thousands of properties to residuary bodies designed to sell them off. Birmingham's town halls, Leeds' civic centres, Westminster's clock towers—all suddenly up for sale. When ownership fragments, maintenance responsibilities vanish. Look at the map: stopped clocks cluster exactly where councils were abolished.
Evidence: 2.5:1 privatisation ratio, geographic correlation with 1986 abolitions and residuary body property transfers
The Lottery Façade
1990-2008
Between 1994 and 2025, the National Lottery Heritage Fund distributed £1.1 billion to restore 8,300 ecclesiastical buildings. Churches got gleaming stonework, fresh stained glass, and working clock mechanisms. What they didn't get: a penny for maintenance. Twenty years is the typical clock maintenance cycle. Look at the heritage data: 61 ecclesiastical buildings with stopped clocks. Almost all were lottery beneficiaries. The façade restoration worked brilliantly. The buildings look beautiful. The clocks don't work. This is what happens when you fund capital but not operations—a 20-year time bomb.
Evidence: 61 ecclesiastical heritage clocks (43.3% of heritage total), 20-year maintenance cycle timing. HLF has awarded £1.1 billion to 8,300 places of worship for capital restoration but no ongoing maintenance.
The Great Austerity
2008-2020
After 2008, council budgets were cut by nearly 50%. Heritage maintenance—already classified as 'discretionary'—was first to go. Here's the smoking gun: we asked 306 councils what they spend on clock maintenance. Only 6.4% could tell us. Not because they're incompetent—because they've lost institutional capacity to even track the cost. Average disclosed maintenance: £2,929/year. That's less than the full time equivalent cost of one council employee for a week. Councils can't afford even that for every clock. Meanwhile, churches restored with lottery money in the 1990s hit their 20-year maintenance cycle—unfunded. Austerity didn't break clocks. It broke the systems that kept them wound.
Evidence: 6.4% cost disclosure rate, £2,929 average maintenance cost, institutional poverty. Council spending power cut by 28.6% in real terms.
Bankruptcy & Decline
2020-2025
Birmingham's Aston Cross Clock Tower has four faces, each showing a different time. None are correct. This isn't a broken clock—it's a symbol of what happens when a council goes bankrupt and responsibility for shared public infrastructure fractures across dozens of uncoordinated actors. Since 2020, local government bankruptcy has become normal. Birmingham, Croydon, Northamptonshire—councils designed to maintain civic life are collapsing. We've documented 241 stopped clocks across the UK. That's 241 communities where shared public time has fractured. This is the endpoint of 45 years of policy that systematically treated civic infrastructure as disposable.
Evidence: Birmingham Section 114 notice, 241 cumulative stopped clocks across the UK, largest ever cuts to a local authority budget (£149m in 2024/25)
Geographic Distribution
All 242 stopped clocks shown in gray. Filter by ownership type to see patterns of privatisation across the UK—ecclesiastical and commercial filters show ALL clocks of that type, revealing the full scale of fragmented responsibility.
Ownership Breakdown
For every council-managed stopped clock, there are 2.1 stopped clocks in privatised buildings.
The Accountability Gap
83.5% of stopped clocks are in buildings outside FOI reach. Privatisation creates literal transparency gaps.
Heritage at Risk
118 Grade I and II listed buildings with stopped clocks, 83.9% outside council control.
What the Clocks Tell Us
Here's what 308 FOI requests and 243 stopped clocks reveal: this didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen quickly. It happened through four decades of policy choices that treated civic infrastructure as discretionary, heritage maintenance as optional, and shared public time as someone else's problem.
The 2.1:1 privatisation ratio isn't a natural phenomenon. It's the mathematical result of the 1986 metropolitan abolitions, the lottery façade that funded restoration but not maintenance, the austerity cuts that eliminated institutional capacity, and the bankruptcies that made council collapse routine. Each policy made sense in isolation. Together, they fragmented responsibility until no-one was responsible for anything.
The 83.5% accountability gap tells you what happens when you privatise civic buildings without privatising civic obligation. When a council-owned clock stops, we can ask why through FOI. When a privately-owned clock stops, we can't. Transparency follows ownership, not heritage designation. Most of our architectural inheritance now sits behind corporate doors where freedom of information law can't reach.
What surprises isn't that clocks stopped—mechanisms fail, that's physics. What surprises is how methodically we dismantled the systems that kept them wound. Councils that once tracked every public clock now struggle to remember which ones they're responsible for. The 6.4% cost disclosure rate isn't incompetence. It's institutional amnesia, policy-induced.
These 243 stopped clocks map something larger than broken mechanisms. They map the fragmentation of civic coherence itself—the quiet, bureaucratic dissolution of the idea that some things belong to everyone and therefore deserve collective care. They're frozen at different times because that's what happens when shared infrastructure gets divided among actors with different incentives, different budgets, and different definitions of whose problem this is.
The councils that still maintain their clocks—Hastings with its 6 working clocks (despite being in the top ten list of deprived areas), Arun with its 3—prove this isn't inevitable. Where funding exists and responsibility remains clear, the clocks work. But that's not the story most councils can tell anymore. Most can't tell any story at all, because they've lost the capacity to know what they're responsible for.
So here we are: 243 stopped clocks, 113 FOI responses still pending, and a privatisation ratio that precisely maps four decades of policy choices. The clocks haven't told the right time in years. But they're still telling us something. Something about what we decided was worth keeping and what we decided could quietly break. Something about the distance between "heritage" as performance (restored façades, lottery plaques) and heritage as practice (the daily winding, the quarterly maintenance, the unspectacular care that keeps civic time running).
The deadline for the remaining FOI responses was 21st November 2025. By then we'll know the full picture. But we already know enough. We know that 243 communities lost their shared public time not because the mechanisms failed, but because we built a system that made their failure inevitable. We know that heritage protection means nothing if it doesn't include maintenance funding. We know that privatisation fragments responsibility until responsibility dissolves entirely.
And we know that somewhere in Birmingham, the Aston Cross Clock Tower still shows four different times, none correct. Not because no-one cares, but because everyone who might care has been systematically prevented from caring effectively. That's not a broken clock. That's a working map of how we broke the systems that kept them running.
The clocks will tell you the time again when we decide that shared public infrastructure deserves systematic public care. Until then, they'll keep doing what they've been doing: marking the moment we stopped winding them, frozen evidence of a policy choice we're still living with.