Westminster Abbey bells mark Queen's 70th wedding anniversary

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip today celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary with the bells of the Westminster Abbey here, where the royal couple got married in 1947, ringing non-stop for over three hours.
The complicated peal of the bells consisted of 5,070 changes or sequences with the number 70 added on as a nod to the platinum anniversary.
The Abbey, the grand Gothic church near the UK Parliament complex in London, was where the royal couple had got married on November 20, 1947.
"The marriage of the then Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten took place at Westminster Abbey on 20th November 1947," Buckingham Palace said in a statement on Twitter as it released an additional set of photographs of the royal couple.

"In these new photographs, The Queen and The Duke were pictured in front of a platinum-textured back drop," the statement noted.
As with the portrait released over the weekend, the new setwere also taken by British photographer Matt Holyoak of Camera Press in theWhite Drawing Room at Windsor Castle earlier this month.

The Queen is seen in a cream dress designed by Angela Kelly, her dressmaker for the last 15 years, with a golden "Scarab" brooch which was a gift from her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, in 1966.
In the photographs, the couple are seen smiling, looking straight at the camera and at each other in one of them.

The release of the portraits is accompanied by the issue of a new set of six postage stamps by Royal Mail to mark the milestone for the longest-serving monarch and the longest- living consort in British history.
It had already been announced that the couple, both in their nineties, will be marking their special anniversary at a private dinner in Windsor Castle today with some close friends and family members.
While the Queen, 91, continues with many of her duties as Britain's head of state, 96-year-old Prince Philip, retired from royal duties earlier this year.
Theyare preparing to welcome their sixth great- grandchild in April 2018, when the third child of Prince William and Kate Middleton is born.

When they married, the Queen was a 21-year-old princess and heir to the British throne and the Duke was a 26-year-old sailor who had served in the UK's Royal Navy during the World War II.
Then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had summed up the occasion as "a flash of colour on the hard road we travel".