Why Britain’s oldest bell foundry still has a peal after 500 years

The rain is torrential in the City of London. Exiting its eastern limit at Aldgate on foot, past bustling coffee shops, I leap over puddles toward Whitechapel High Street. Historically, this area beyond London’s Square Mile knew industry and immigrants. There were once big breweries that are now indoor markets. Before those, there were Huguenot weavers and, earlier still, bell foundries. Of these, only one survives, and its work resonates around the world.

I arrive at Whitechapel Bell Foundry soaked to the skin. The business’s Regency façade is not only Dickensian but I’d bet Dickens himself would have known it. This has been the foundry’s home since 1738, before which it was the Artichoke Inn, a brick tavern that sheltered travellers to London while the city was being rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666. An original lead rainwater cistern dated 1670 is still earning its keep in the courtyard.

This is Britain’s oldest bell foundry — and, in fact, its oldest company — though it modestly discounts its indirect origins in a 14th-century Aldgate churchyard nearby. The present foundry descends from Robert Mot in 1570. One of Mot’s bells, with the foundry’s signature three-bells symbol, still hangs in Westminster Abbey.

Nigel Taylor is the head moulder and my guide round the grey-brick workshop stuffed with cinder, cast ironwork and wooden boxes. It might be a stage set for Oliver! the musical, but the foundry’s soundtrack today is Led Zeppelin, provided by a soniferous colleague known as Budd (real name Terry).

Taylor tells me he had expected to be a civil service accountant but changed his mind at the last minute. His passion was bell-ringing, which he learnt as a child in rural Oxfordshire. “I’d cycle to churches, bang on the door and ask to see the bells. I wrote to Whitechapel and asked about any vacancies.” That was 39 years ago.

Taylor listens intently, answering my questions with an “Oh!”, as if he’d never thought of it before. It is charming; there is no routine spiel. His assistant, Simon Parsons, occasionally chimes in, Taylor nodding in agreement. There is a strong sense of bonhomie here.

Their main customers are English parish churches, although the eastern US also likes English bells. This relationship goes back to the colonial era, when Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast Philadelphia’s famous Liberty Bell in 1752.

“We still do everything in feet and inches, pounds, ounces and hundredweight,” says Taylor. “Bells are sold as objects, not on their weight, so we’re exempt from ‘kilo’ legislation.”

This triumph in the avoidance of modernity is tempered by the presence of a yellow steel gantry for conveying molten metal, an oil-fired cylinder furnace and, says Taylor, “I introduced G-clamps. Some didn’t like it.”

How do commissions translate into specific sizes of bell? “The questions are: how big is your tower and how big is your budget?” explains Taylor. Bell-ringing can sway a church tower, so installing such heavy objects in an old structure must be done carefully — the lower down they are the better, a structural engineer would advise.

When the required number of bells — say, six, eight or a dozen — and their musical key have been decided, they are prepared in cast-iron moulds. Taylor shows me half a dozen different sizes. The outer casing, called a cope, is lined with dry loam bricks to reduce the drying time of its wet lining. This lining is made from a mixture of sand from Sevenoaks in Kent and Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, plus loam, goat hair and horse manure mixed with straw, knocked up with water in an old bread dough mixer.

“We get the manure from Norfolk, as most stables have wood shavings these days,” says Parsons. He explains that the straw is essential because when it burns away in the kiln it leaves behind a network of passages through which air pressure and fumes can escape during the firing. Taylor nods vigorously, then adds: “I don’t think you really need the manure.” But it’s clear they won’t change to mere straw after all this time.

The unholy concoction is spread into the cope, coating the loam bricks. The founders then insert a template — half a bell, placed vertically and rotated around a central metal pole — to form the external surface, hand-finished with impressions of patterns and lettering. Taylor’s spacing of letters betrays a sensitive eye for typography, a living iteration of London’s steel printing tradition. “That’s a main reward of the job,” he says. “Dedications are personal and will still be read in 200 years.” Sometimes casts from damaged old bells are used, renewing the life of previous founders’ work.

Once the design is suitably impressed, the cope is dried in a kiln overnight and finished with graphite powder. The inner mould is similarly made, the cope lowered over it to achieve the required bell-shaped void, which is when Taylor flourishes his G-clamps to secure them. The furnace is loaded with 77 per cent copper and 23 per cent tin; the result, high tin bronze, melts at 1,150C (“any hotter, and the tin takes off like a snowstorm”, says Taylor). They pour the liquid into a crucible with a spout, filling the mould. To enable this top-filling, larger bells are made in a pit in the ground.

Several huge moulds hang on the walls. “That one, that’s Big Ben, the original mould,” says Taylor. “The other one is Bow Bells, the 1762 casting. The Germans bombed those.”

A bell takes a few days to cool. The founders cast on a Friday and on Monday the loam mix is crumbled away from the warm metal. The foundry’s tuner, Ben Kipling, then spins and shaves the bells to achieve perfect pitch. Doesn’t Led Zeppelin put him off his work? “I don’t hear it,” he replies. “I prefer Schoenberg,” Taylor chips in. “The avant-garde, atonal stuff.” Quite without irony, Kipling nods in appreciation.

Tours of the foundry take place on Saturdays; whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk

A cracking story: the Liberty Bell

John Matchette keeps an old Liberty Bell brand apple box in his garage in Raphine, Virginia, Jonathan Foyle writes. I know this because he is my father-in-law, but through similar everyday consumption, this icon still resonates in US consciousness. Americans explode Liberty Bell fireworks, mash Liberty Bell potatoes and, occasionally, fry Liberty Bell Colorado offal. But the Liberty Bell itself is famously, uselessly cracked.

The 2,000lb original was ordered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges for Pennsylvania, with the prophetic inscription “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” from Leviticus 25:10.

Whitechapel Bell Foundry was commissioned to create the bell and Thomas Lester cast it in E-flat. The bell was rolled off a ship in sound condition in Philadelphia on September 1 in 1752. On its first striking the following spring, however, it cracked.

The Philadelphians demanded that Whitechapel recast the bell, though practical demands favoured the local partnership of Pass and Stow.

The pair’s increased proportion of copper failed tonally, but another attempt restored the original balance of metals — and the tone. Their second cast is the present bell.

The bell was rung out at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on July 8 1776, and a year later it was smuggled to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to avoid it being captured by the British.

From 1837, the Liberty Bell became the symbol of slave abolitionists and other civil causes.

The crack seen today may have been caused by Emmanuel Joseph Rauch, who recalled how in 1835 he was invited to ring the bell with a group of boys, when the tone suddenly changed.

Nonetheless, at the bicentenary of American Independence in 1976, a mock protest gathered outside Whitechapel Bell Foundry with placards carrying such slogans as: “We got a lemon” and “What about the warranty?”

Whitechapel’s official response was: “We told them we would be happy to replace the bell — as long as it was returned to us in its original packaging.”

Photographs: Charlie Bibby; Getty Images