John Claridge At The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Remembering John Claridge who died last Sunday aged eighty-two
John Claridge first visited the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1982 to photograph the life of Britain’s oldest manufacturing company, founded in 1570. He returned in 2016, just before it closed, to take another set of pictures. Remarkably, little changed in the intervening years.
‘It was like walking through a time portal,’ John told me. ‘There was a very tactile feeling about the place, where craftsmanship held sway, and my pictures pay testament to that feeling.’
A decade after it closed, the developers have abandoned their ludicrous plan to convert the foundry to a bell-themed boutique hotel and today it hosts property guardians while sinking into decay and acquiring graffiti. Meanwhile the London Bell Foundry continues its campaign to buy the building and reopen it as a working foundry.
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