Big Ben, London · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Big Ben was never the tower. It's the thirteen ton bell inside it, and the tower itself only picked up the name by mistake, so thoroughly that it was formally renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 and almost nobody noticed or cared. The bell has its own scar too. It cracked in 1859, just months after it first rang, and rather than replace it, engineers gave it a quarter turn and a lighter hammer so an undamaged patch took the strikes instead. It's never been repaired. That distinctive chime everyone recognises is, technically, the sound of a broken bell.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.