The Leicestershire market town that is home to John Taylor & Co, the last major bell foundry in Britain, where bells have been cast by hand in an unbroken line since the fourteenth century.
Loughborough is a Leicestershire market town, and for the archive it is one thing above all: the home of John Taylor & Co, the last major bell foundry in Britain and the largest working bell foundry in the world. Bells have been cast within a few miles of here since the fourteenth century, in a line that has never broken. The Taylor family came into the trade in 1784 and settled in Loughborough in 1839.
The archive spent a day on the foundry's casting floor and in its museum in June 2026, documenting the craft and two of the men who carry it: Giridhar Vadukar, the chief tuner and one of only three bell tuners left in the country, and Bill Bowes, the foreman of forty-one years who makes the iron that holds and swings a bell. Bell founding is on the Heritage Crafts Red List, and the account of the visit runs through the monograph The Craft of Bell Founding and the journal entries A Morning at Taylor's and Inside the Bellfoundry Museum.
Makers Giridhar Vadukar is the chief tuner at John Taylor & Co in Loughborough, the last major bell foundry in Britain, and one of only three bell tuners left in the country. Forty-seven years in the trade, thirty of them here, tuning each bell’s five notes by shaving metal from the inside - by ear as much as by eye. Bell founding is on the Heritage Crafts Red List.
Makers Bill Bowes is the foreman at John Taylor & Co in Loughborough, the last major bell foundry in Britain. Forty-one years with the firm, twenty-seven of them in the foundry, and the man who makes the iron that holds and swings a bell - the headstocks, the wheels, the fittings drilled and pinned to the thousandth. If Giridhar gives a bell its voice, Bill gives it the means to ring. Bell founding is on the Heritage Crafts Red List.
Makers Bell founding is the casting and tuning of bells from bronze, an English trade unbroken since the fourteenth century and now held by a handful of foundries - chief among them John Taylor & Co in Loughborough, the last major bell foundry in Britain. How a bell is moulded, cast, and tuned to its five notes by hand, why the craft is on the Heritage Crafts Red List, and who is keeping it alive.