It is not surprising that the British feel a sort of proprietary interest in the passage of time: with Greenwich as the home of the prime meridian, they tend to see keeping track of time as a housekeeping duty they have to perform for the rest of the world, a responsibility that neatly dovetails their country’s practical instincts with its imperial ones. But if you think you own time, how do you express that ownership? You could always build a huge clock, but Britain did that more than a century ago: when the Houses of Parliament got Big Ben. The problem for the millennium has been, in effect, to figure out some kind of contemporary version of Big Ben…[+]