What is bell founding?

Bell founding is the making of bells from bronze - casting the bell in a mould, then tuning it by hand until it rings true. The bronze is the easy part to describe: roughly four parts copper to one part tin, melted and poured. The hard part is everything either side of the pour - the moulding that gives the bell its exact shape, and the tuning that gives it its voice. I spent a morning in June 2026 at John Taylor & Co in Loughborough, the last major bell foundry in Britain, watching both, and the thing that surprised me most is that a single bell is not one note at all. It is five, sounding together, and a bell founder's whole skill is bringing those five into agreement.

Bell founding is the casting and tuning of bells. It is not bell ringing - that is change ringing, the playing of bells already hung in a tower, which is a separate craft with its own tradition and vocabulary. The founder makes the instrument; the ringer plays it. The two are often confused because they share a world, but a foundry is a place of moulds, furnaces and metal, not of ropes and towers.

It is also more than casting alone. Pouring bronze into a bell-shaped mould gets you a lump of metal that very nearly rings true and is, musically, wrong. The casting is perhaps half the craft. The other half is the tuning - and the hanging, the iron fittings and wheels that let a bell swing, which is a specialism of its own. A working bell is the product of three distinct skills - moulding, tuning, and fitting - that in a full foundry live in three different sets of hands.

Bell founding carries a vocabulary that is part foundry, part music, and part church.

Bell metal is the bronze a bell is cast from - roughly 77 per cent copper to 23 per cent tin, a high-tin bronze chosen for the way it rings. The mould is built in two parts: the core, the inner shape that forms the inside of the bell, and the cope, the outer case that forms the outside; the gap between them is the bell. The crown is the top of the bell, where it bolts to its fittings; the waist is the curved side; the soundbow is the thick rim where the clapper strikes; the mouth is the open bottom.

The five tuned notes are the bell's partials: the hum (the lowest), the prime or fundamental, the tierce, the quint and the nominal. Bringing them into true musical relation is true-harmonic or five-tone tuning, often called Simpson tuning after Canon Arthur Simpson, who wrote it up in the 1890s. The iron crown that bolts across the top of a hung bell is the headstock; the wheel is what the rope runs round to swing the bell full circle; the stay is the timber that lets a bell rest mouth-upward between strokes.

It begins with the mould. The shape of a bell - its precise profile from crown to soundbow - is what decides its note and the quality of its tone, and that profile is built up in a loam or sand mould around a core. The cope is brought down over the core, the two clamped true, and the whole thing dried hard. Get the profile right and the bell will come out close to its intended note; get it wrong and no amount of tuning will save it.

Then the casting. Bell metal is melted to well over a thousand degrees and poured into the mould in a single continuous pour, the metal running down to fill the bell-shaped void between cope and core. The bell is left to cool slowly - a large bell can take days - and then broken out of its mould, a one-time operation: the mould is destroyed to release the bell. What comes out is dull, rough, and very nearly the right note.

Last comes the tuning, and this is the part that looks like magic until you watch it done. The bell is set mouth-upward on a vertical tuning machine and turned while a cutting tool reaches inside and shaves bronze from the wall in fine passes. Each of the five partials lives at a different point on the wall of the bell, so the tuner takes metal from a particular place to bring a particular note down to where it should be. It is done by ear as much as by gauge, and it is utterly unforgiving - once the metal is off, it cannot go back, and a bell cut too far is scrap. John Taylor & Co perfected the five-tone, true-harmonic method in 1896, and the principle has not changed since.

The English line of this craft is unbroken since the middle of the fourteenth century, when a founder called Johannes de Stafford - also a mayor of Leicester - was casting bells within ten miles of where they are still cast today. The Taylor family came into the trade in 1784, when Robert Taylor took over a foundry at St Neots, and established themselves in Loughborough in 1839. The archive spent a morning at John Taylor & Co in June 2026 - now the last major bell foundry in Britain and the largest working bell foundry in the world - walking the casting floor, the museum, and the tuning shop.

What stays with me is that the whole craft, at the level of mastery, comes down to a very small number of people. The archive documented Giridhar Vadukar, the foundry's chief tuner and one of only three bell tuners left in the country, who can hear five notes in a single bell and bring them to agreement by hand. And Bill Bowes, the foreman of forty-one years, who makes the iron that holds and swings the bell. The full account of the craft - its history, its method, and its state - is in the monograph The Craft of Bell Founding; the visit itself is told in A Morning at Taylor’s and Inside the Bellfoundry Museum.

Heritage Crafts classes bell founding as critically endangered - its most serious category short of extinct - and it was added to the Red List after the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, which had cast bells since 1570, stopped casting tower bells in 2017. That leaves John Taylor & Co in Loughborough as the last major bell foundry in Britain, with a small number of smaller operations and the casting of handbells continuing elsewhere. A craft that once had a foundry in most large towns now comes down, at scale, to one.

The threat is not that the work is done badly; it is that it is barely being passed on. The skills - moulding, tuning, fitting - each take years to learn, and the market for them is small enough that taking on and training an apprentice is a genuine risk for both sides. Documenting a tuner who is one of three left in the country does not solve that, but it does at least put the work, and the person, on the record while the work is still being done. For the wider picture, see the archive’s guide to the Heritage Crafts Red List; to learn a related craft or find where bells are rung, the Learn a Craft directory points the way.

Is bell founding the same as bell ringing?
No. Bell founding is the making of the bell - casting it from bronze and tuning it. Bell ringing, or change ringing, is the playing of bells already hung in a tower. The founder makes the instrument; the ringer plays it.

How is a bell tuned?
A bell is not one note but five sounding at once - the hum, prime, tierce, quint and nominal. The tuner mounts the bell mouth-upward on a vertical tuning machine and shaves metal from the inside with a cutting tool, in fine passes, until the five partials fall into true musical intervals. John Taylor & Co perfected this five-tone, true-harmonic method in 1896.

Where are bells still made in England?
The last major bell foundry in Britain is John Taylor & Co in Loughborough, Leicestershire, the largest working bell foundry in the world. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London cast its last tower bells in 2017. Heritage Crafts classes bell founding as critically endangered.