The sound of a broken bell

Quick correction nobody asked for: Big Ben isn't the tower. It never was. Big Ben is the thirteen ton bell inside it, and the tower borrowed the name so completely that when it was finally given an official one, the Elizabeth Tower, in 2012, almost nobody bothered to switch.

The bell's got its own story too. It cracked in 1859, only months after it first rang out, and instead of replacing the whole thing, engineers just gave it a quarter turn and fitted a lighter hammer, so an undamaged section of the bell took the strikes instead of the cracked one. It's never been fixed. That famous chime everyone can hum without thinking is, technically, a broken bell doing its best.

I painted it in watercolour and ink, that unmistakable clock face over Westminster. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Big Ben, London · Travel Poster