Standing tall at the busy junction of Lake Town-VIP Road crossing in northeast Kolkata, adorning the way from the Netaji Subhash Chandra International Airport at Lake Town, a newly constructed 100-feet high tower, containing a replica of London's Big Ben, is an amazing slice of the British capital in the City of Calcutta. The idea of the surprising clock tower was conceived by Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, with the intention of incorporating London's architecture in the city, and an unused small plot at the intersection of Lake Town and VIP Road, infamous for nasty traffic jams, was selected for the project.

Although it was a difficult proposition to erect such a structure in one of the most congested areas of the city, the local MLA and the South Dum Dum Municipality Chairman, both personally and officially shared the initiative to take up the construction of the 135-feet tower worth Rs 1.36 crores (13.6 million), adorned with retro watches on four cardinal direction provided by the Anglo Swiss Company and the cornerstone of the project was laid by the local MLA, Sujit Bose on 1st December 2014.

However, although construction of replicas of famous landmarks is not a new phenomenon, as Bangladesh has built a clone of the famous Taj Mahal in its capital city of Dhaka, and even the Japanese have a replica of The Statue of Liberty in the city of Odaiba, the project of creating a replica of Big Ben Clock Tower in the City of Calcutta created a wave of adverse criticism from many quarters. It was argued that all the iconic landmarks in a city have strong historical and cultural backgrounds, which justify their creation, and simply replicating a landmark of a particular city to another, without any historic link to the area is meaningless, superfluous, and adds no glory to the city.

Nevertheless, although frowned upon by the purists, and questions were raised regarding squandering public money in such an extravagant, meaningless and baseless beautification project, the work was carried on uninterruptedly and the new clock tower, resembling The Big Ben Tower in London, christened as Kolkata Time Zone by Mamata Banerjee, was completed in October 2015.

While The Big Ben of London is 316 feet (96 m) tall, the Calcutta edition of the tower is only around 100 feet (30.48 m), with 78.74 feet (24 m) of concrete piling at the base. However, to create the Big Ben-like façade, the external structure of the Calcutta tower has been fabricated with fibre reinforced polymer, which has been cast into hundreds of blocks and subsequently installed around the tower with maximum care and accuracy. . Nevertheless, the Calcutta clock tower, resembling The Big Ben of London and named Kolkata Time Zone, has one floor short of the London Big Ben’s 10 floors, but like the original Big Ben Tower, it also has four gigantic clock dials on the tower, facing in all four cardinal directions. However, while the dials of the Big Ben clock have diameters of 23 feet (7.0 m), the diameters of the Calcutta clocks are of 11.8 feet (3.6 m) only.

Although criticised as inappropriate, the tower has visibly lessened the traffic problem and has acted as a catalyst for a boom of the roadside fast food stalls of the locality.