A family of founders that moved to the Midlands.

Taylor’s Bellfoundry traces itself to the eighteenth century. Its history says Robert Taylor was apprenticed to the founder Edward Arnold in 1775 and took over the foundry at St Neots in 1784. The family business moved to Oxford in 1821, added a second foundry at Buckland Brewer in Devon in 1825, and in 1839 set up in Loughborough, in Leicestershire, casting a new ring of bells for the parish church.

Its website’s page title states the date it uses most often: “Taylor’s has been producing high quality bells in Loughborough since 1839.” Wikipedia names the family’s key figure as John Taylor (1797–1858), and dates the move to the current site on Freehold Street to 1859. By then, Taylor’s says, it had “the world’s largest purpose-built bellfoundry” — a claim we attribute.

Its most famous bell is Great Paul, cast in 1881 for St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Wikipedia gives it 17,002 kg and calls it “the heaviest bell ever cast at Taylor’s and the second heaviest bell in the UK” — second only to the 2012 Olympic Bell, which was cast in the Netherlands. In 1940 Taylor’s cast Great George, about 14.9 tonnes, for Liverpool Cathedral. The bell that overtook Great Paul — the 2012 Olympic Bell, about 23 tonnes — was designed and tuned in London but cast by Eijsbouts in the Netherlands.

Administration, rescue and a trust.

Taylor’s itself very nearly closed. Its then owners went into administration on 18 September 2009, according to Wikipedia. On 15 October 2009 a consortium of bell ringers and industry investors, UK Bell Foundries Ltd, bought the business and restored the John Taylor & Co name. The operating company today is John Taylor Bell Foundry (Loughborough) Limited, registered in England in September 2009; the buying company, UK Bell Foundries Ltd, had been incorporated in 2007, and the old holding company was dissolved in 2012.

In 2016 the directors went further and set up the Loughborough Bellfoundry Trust, a charitable incorporated organisation, transferring to it “buildings, equipment, intellectual property and the museum” — “in perpetuity,” Wikipedia says. In practice, a charity now holds the heritage, and an operating company casts the bells — two bodies, one name, and one foundry in Loughborough.

The rescue was then properly funded. Taylor’s received a £1 million emergency repair grant in 2014 from English Heritage (now Historic England), and in 2020 the trust secured almost £4 million from the National Lottery Heritage Fund towards a £6 million restoration. The Grade II* buildings have since come off the Heritage at Risk register, and the museum relaunched in autumn 2024. Taylor’s employs about 30 people, and its archive holds records for more than 10,000 towers.

“Britain’s Last Bellfoundry.”

Taylor’s homepage uses a strong line: “Britain’s Last Bellfoundry,” and elsewhere, “As the only remaining bellfoundry in the UK.” That is the company’s claim, and a contestable one — Whitechapel’s tower bells are now cast in Britain by Westley Group, according to Whitechapel’s 2017 statement. Heritage Crafts is more measured: bell founding, it says, “takes place almost solely in Loughborough.”

The same homepage also says “Crafting Excellence Since the 1850s,” which sits awkwardly beside its own 1839 date — a small inconsistency in an otherwise strong heritage story. Heritage Crafts lists bell founding as “critically endangered” in Britain.

Bell metal is a bronze of roughly four parts copper to one of tin — “approximately 78% copper and 22% tin,” according to the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, “heated in a furnace to above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.” Tin is the scarce ingredient: the US Geological Survey estimates world tin mine output at about 290,000 tonnes in 2025, and says the average New York dealer price for refined tin rose 13 per cent that year, to 1,600 cents a pound.

In 2014 UNESCO selected Belgium’s programme for “Safeguarding the carillon culture” for its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices, noting that the programme “exists in seventy-six cities and villages of Belgium and in thirty countries worldwide.” The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America counts “more than 180 carillons in North America and more than 450 elsewhere in the world.” Taylor’s casts rings of bells for English churches, a related tradition, and the international recognition of bell music frames what a foundry like Loughborough’s produces. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed manual bell ringing in Spain on its Representative List, and in 2024 extended it to Italy, describing it as “a form of communication that is tied to the classification, acoustics and shapes of bells, bell towers and belfries.”

The London story is the obvious comparison. Whitechapel, which recast Big Ben in 1858, cast its last tower bells on 22 March 2017, and its site was given planning permission in 2021 for a 103-bedroom hotel. Taylor’s, which cast Great Paul for St Paul’s in 1881, was rescued in 2009 and is now held by a charity. The two great English foundries of the nineteenth century took opposite paths: one is now a name without its building, the other a building held in trust so that its name can go on casting.

A foundry name over a town.

Taylor’s brand is its town as much as its name: “Loughborough since 1839,” a Grade II* foundry on Freehold Street, a museum and an archive of more than 10,000 towers. Its strongest claim — Britain’s last bell foundry — is also its most fragile, because it depends on what counts as a foundry. A safer line, and still a strong one, is the one Heritage Crafts uses, and the one the history supports: Loughborough is where English bell founding now mostly happens.

For a design guide, Taylor’s shows a heritage brand rebuilt by its own customers. Bell ringers were among those who bought it in 2009, and a charity now holds its buildings and intellectual property. Compare Whitechapel, whose name survived its foundry, and Eijsbouts, a family firm that absorbed its last national rival.

For this guide we use a foundry green and a sage with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No bell, foundry building or logo is reproduced.

Keep Taylor’s Bellfoundry’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.