The tower itself was constructed somewhere between 1604 and 1634, and it is older-looking than its construction date because the stone was older. Recycled medieval blocks gave it a deep weathered character from the day it was finished. Tradition held that the stone came from a gatehouse that once stood at the west end of Oldgate, but the better evidence points to Newminster Abbey - the nearby Cistercian house that had been dissolved in 1537 under Henry VIII. The abbey's loss became the tower's gain. Sixty feet tall, with walls three feet six inches thick, the structure was built to last. It still stands in Morpeth's Market Place, a few yards from Morpeth Town Hall, which was designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in 1714 - the same architect who shaped Seaton Delaval Hall a few miles to the east.

Richard Phelps was one of the most prominent bell founders of his generation. His Whitechapel Bell Foundry, in London, would cast Big Ben more than a century later. In 1706 he produced six bells at the request of Major General Edmund Maine, intended for the parish church of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Then Berwick declined to send Maine to Parliament. Morpeth voted differently and got him in, and the bells came with him as a gift to the corporation. The tower had no belfry to receive them. A top storey was added in 1706 specifically to accommodate the peal. The bells hung there for two centuries until they fell into disrepair in the early twentieth. In 1951 John Taylor & Co - the bell founders at Loughborough - recast them and hung them in a new cast iron frame. The recasting was timed to commemorate the Festival of Britain.

The Clock Tower stands in remarkable architectural company. Vanbrugh's Morpeth Town Hall is its near neighbour, completed in 1714 and now much altered. The YMCA building of 1905, in a different style entirely, completes the immediate group. Vanbrugh, who built Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace and Seaton Delaval Hall, was working in the same Northumberland during the same decade in which the bells were being cast for the tower. The Clock Tower itself is now a Grade II* listed building - the asterisk indicating a building of more than special interest, sitting just below Grade I. It is one of the few free-standing clock towers in Britain that predates the Victorian era. The bells still ring across the market on weekdays, the same ones recast in 1951, the same notes that once would have rung in Berwick if the votes had gone the other way.