Technically, Big Ben isn’t the clock tower at all, it’s the Great Bell inside it. The tower itself, officially the Elizabeth Tower since a 2012 renaming to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, was for most of its history simply known as the Clock Tower. The name Big Ben stuck to the whole structure by popular usage long before it was ever official, most likely named after Sir Benjamin Hall, the commissioner of works who oversaw the bell’s installation in 1859.
The bell itself weighs over 13 tonnes, and cracked within two months of its first ringing, a flaw engineers resolved by rotating the bell and using a lighter hammer, the crack still visible, and part of the reason for the bell’s distinctive tone, to this day. The clock mechanism it powers was, for over 150 years, celebrated as one of the most accurate large tower clocks in the world, regulated in part by a stack of old pre-decimal pennies placed on the pendulum to make tiny adjustments to its swing.
Silenced for Restoration, Louder in Absence
Between 2017 and 2022, Big Ben underwent its most extensive restoration in over a century, and fell largely silent for most of that period, save for select occasions such as New Year’s Eve and Remembrance Sunday. Its absence made international news in a way its constant chiming rarely had, a reminder of how deeply the sound itself, not just the tower, had become part of London’s identity.
The tower leans very slightly, around 46 centimetres off vertical at its tip, the result of centuries of London clay shifting beneath its foundations, though engineers consider the tilt stable and not a structural concern.
Painting a Silhouette Everyone Already Knows
Elizabeth Tower’s Gothic Revival detail, set against London’s shifting grey sky, is a familiar enough silhouette that a watercolourist has to work hard to make it feel freshly seen. We’ve captured it in our own Big Ben London Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of London for a wall at home.
A bell that lent its name to a tower it was never officially named after, Big Ben remains one of the few landmarks where the nickname simply won.