Around Town

You’d probably get a visit from Social Services these days if you tried to teach your children a nursery rhyme about beheading people who owe you money. But for a long time, Londoners were proud to recognise their city by the sound of church bells negotiating a repayment schedule for a loan of five farthings. Some of the bells in the rhyme have been silenced or drowned out over the years, but the fact that the bells of St Clement Danes on the Strand still say ‘Oranges and lemons’, and the Great Bell of Bow still doesn’t know, is thanks to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which replaced numerous bells lost to the Blitz, not only in London but across the country.
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You could say that the Foundry knows a bit about bells. Recent research has dated its origins back to Master Founder Robert Chamberlain,
who began making bells in 1420, and though the premises moved from one side of Whitechapel to the other after the Great Fire of 1666, little else has changed in the business which is listed in ‘Guinness World Records’ as the oldest manufacturing company in Britain.

Whitechapel Bell Foundry

As a listed building, the Foundry stands as a lonely piece of picturesque old London amid the thundering traffic and unlovely concrete of modern Whitechapel. But on entering – naturally there’s a beautiful ‘ding’ as you open the door – you find yourself not in a primped and polished heritage site but a briskly no-nonsense business setting. Apart from a shop and a display in the small lobby explaining some of the history of the site, all the action takes place behind the scenes, in the workshops.

Luckily, the Foundry operates tours twice daily on alternate Saturdays. The tours are not suitable for children and involve steep and narrow staircases, but they are wildly popular, not just with bell enthusiasts but with historians too. Large parties should think about booking at least a year ahead, though one or two visitors can sometimes be accommodated at slightly shorter notice so it’s worth checking if they have any spaces. The tour lasts 90 minutes or more, and visitors get a detailed explanation of the entire process: how the loam or wet sand moulds are made, how the metal is heated and poured and how the finished bells are tuned, polished and fitted. All around the workshop there are bells at various stages of manufacture, from small clock bells, to musical handbells and sometimes even massive church bells which have to be cast in a special pit under the foundry due to their size.

According to Mark Backhouse, who showed Time Out round the Foundry, there are two questions which visitors most commonly ask: the first is ‘where do you get the horse manure you use in your loam moulds?’ (‘It’s a short answer starting with H,’ he says drily). The second is ‘How can I get a job here?’ And the answer to that is, with great difficulty. ‘We do get youngsters entering the business at the bottom end and working their way up if they show an interest or aptitude for a particular part of the process,’ says Backhouse. We’ve got one young lad here now, but his dad also works here – that’s often been the case historically. But most of the staff here have got long service. Our bell tuner, Nigel, came here as a moulder straight from school and he’s been here 30 years now.’

The most famous bell made here is of course Big Ben, which celebrates its 150th birthday this year – a year before the bell-tower which houses it, incidentally, because the clock had to be largely built around the bell. It was cast by George Mears, then the master founder and owner of the Foundry, in 1858, for the princely sum of £1,829.

It was far too big to tune (‘It came out as an E and it stayed an E,’ says Backhouse) but was transported safely to Westminster amid cheering crowds and rang sweetly for two months before cracking – presumably much to the horror of Mears – under the strain of the over-heavy hammer fitted against the Foundry’s advice by the clock’s designer Edmund Denison. The crack remains to this day, giving Big Ben its familiar, slightly wonky, sound. The Foundry is still called in every couple of decades to update the fittings, but the bell’s imperfections remain untouched.

It’s appropriate that the sound of a bell – an invention possibly predating the written word – is still at the heart of our society and politics. Even in its most secular context – introducing a news bulletin or simply telling the time – there’s something in the sound that retains a devotional aspect, a directness which cuts through centuries and puts us in touch with something ancient – and still very beautiful.

Whitechapel Bell Foundry is at 32/34 Whitechapel Rd, E1 (www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/020 7375 1979) Aldgate East or Whitechapel tube. Tours operate on alternate Saturdays and must be booked in advance. Tickets £8. Not suitable for under-14s.