Benjamin Kipling, Bell Tuner
The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry continues at 10am today, with live-tweeting at @savethewbf.
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Benjamin Kipling
One Sunday morning, I joined Benjamin Kipling and his bellringing pals for a congenial breakfast in Waterloo Station after they had rung the bells before the service at St John’s church across the road. Once we had finished our chat, I accompanied Benjamin who could not resist returning to Francis Octavius Bedford’s handsome bell tower of 1822 to ring again after the service. Working now in Somerset from Monday to Friday, Benjamin commutes back and forth by car each weekend to fulfil his bellringing commitments in the capital. Even when we shook hands to say goodbye and he climbed into his sports car, Benjamin was setting off to judge a ringing contest in Cranford as a detour on his journey to the West Country – such is the passion of the man for bells.
The Gentle Author – How should a bell sound?
Benjamin Kipling – A nice bell should have a crisp, clear strike note, followed by the hum coming through underneath, and the hum should be stable and long-lasting.
The Gentle Author – What does the job of a bell tuner consist of?
Benjamin Kipling – Well, the basics involve mounting the bell, mouth upwards, on a very big vertical lathe and taking metal out of different areas inside to alter the partial tones within the mouth. A bell does not just produce a single frequency, a bell has lots and lots of different modes of vibration, and each mode of vibration produces a different frequency and therefore a different note. The standard for bell tuning for the last century has been to aim towards what we refer to as Simpson tuning, so the five lowest notes in the bell strike a minor chord.
The Gentle Author – Why cannot a bell be cast to make the right sound?
Benjamin Kipling – The thickness of the wall of a bell has to be precise to get exactly the right note and – to be perfectly honest – casting techniques just are not that good, they never have been. So to get a bell absolutely precise, the only way is to cast it deliberately too thick and scratch a bit off.
The Gentle Author – Once a bell has been cast, are you the next person to work on it?
Benjamin Kipling – The people in the loam shop dig the newly cast bell out from the mould, removing the core of bricks and loam, and doing a little bit of tidying up on the inscription. Then the bell is passed to me and I do a bit more work to the inscription just to make it looks as nice as possible. I start by putting the bell mouth down on the lathe and skimming across it to give a flat surface on the top before I turn the bell over, bolt it to the machine, and tune it.
The Gentle Author – How do you assess a bell in order to tune it?
Benjamin Kipling – This has been one of the limiting factors in the development of bell tuning. It was only in late Victorian times with the advent of the calibrated tuning fork that it became possible to accurately record the frequencies within a bell. Calibrated tuning forks were the normal way of doing things up until the nineteen seventies and Whitechapel’s tuning forks were still in use until the end – we used them sometimes to double check.
Today, we have other ways of doing it. An electronic stroboscope tuner employs a microphone attached to a light which shines through a spinning wheel, and you can adjust the speed so that if there is a frequency in the sound that corresponds to the spinning wheel, it will appear to stand still. This is the method I use for finishing tuning bells because it is reliably accurate, but there is also a quicker – if slightly less accurate way – of pitching bells using a laptop computer and Fourier Transform software which instantly reads the main partial tones.
The Gentle Author – So it is a question of striking the bell and then bridging the difference between what it is and what you want it to sound like, do you expect to get there immediately or is it a long process?
Benjamin Kipling – Bell tuning is a job of many stages. Calculating what I am aiming for in a particular bell gives me the size of the gap. Usually, I try and make a series of cuts that will get me halfway between where I was and where I need to be, so I can check the bell is responding as I expect it to. Then I will go half as far again, and half as far again, and gradually close in, which theoretically means I never get there. Yet, in practice, this is engineering not mathematics and if I overshoot by a fraction of a semitone then nobody is going to notice. I try and tune a bell to within a cent, which is 1/100 of a semitone, but nobody is going to hear if it is two or three cents out.
The Gentle Author – Are there different kinds of cuts you make to a bell?
Benjamin Kipling – Only in terms of shallow cuts or deep cuts, but they are in different areas of the bell. For instance, if you cut metal out of the shoulder of the bell, the second partial tone flattens more quickly. In the middle of the bell, it is the hum note, the lowest one, that flattens the most quickly. Towards the lip, it is the nominal tone which flattens most quickly. Generally, wherever you take metal off a bell all of the partial tones will move – so it is a juggling act.
The Gentle Author – What is the minimum number of cuts?
Benjamin Kipling – One! But if you are tuning a bell and you are getting very close, you might make one little scratch and test it again, and make another scratch and test it again – it could take dozens.
The Gentle Author – Do you rely upon your ears or instruments?
Benjamin Kipling – The ear is always the final arbiter as to whether a bell sounds good or not. The instruments are there to tell me what is wrong and by how much. I can hear if something is wrong with a bell but I may not necessarily be able to tell exactly what is wrong or by how much, and that is where the instrumentation comes in.
The Gentle Author – Tell me some bells that you are proud to have tuned.
Benjamin Kipling – Absolutely. The five largest at St James Garlickhythe and also all ten of the new bells at St Dunstan-in-the-West on Fleet Street. The tenor bell there is the only bell where I have ever managed to get it to exactly where I want within a fraction of a 100th of a semitone. On paper, that is the best bell I have ever cut. In practice, bigger bells always sound better than little bells. They have more presence and more power, and so the best of all would probably be the largest bell I have tuned, which was for a carillon in the United States. It was cast at 43 hundredweight – a little over two tonnes – and finished at 37 hundredweight, after I tuned six hundredweight out of it. You could hit the bell, walk away, come back a couple of minutes later and still hear it humming.
The Gentle Author – Is there an element of subjectivity in this work?
Benjamin Kipling – There is more than one way to skin a cat. You get differences in character of bells and that can be down to how the tuner approaches the bell. Also, the shape of a bell varies according to who cast it. There are subtle differences between the profile of a Whitechapel Bell, the profile of a Taylor bell or a Gillett & Johnson bell.
The Gentle Author – How did you become a bell tuner?
Benjamin Kipling – At school, I did not like music very much which was maybe because I did not want to learn to play an instrument. I had an interest in music theory, but the teachers did not think it was worthwhile teaching me music theory if I was not going to be learning an instrument. So I dropped music at the earliest opportunity.
Then, in sixth form, a friend of mine who was a bell ringer said, ‘Why don’t you come along on Wednesday night and learn to ring bells?’ So I did and I found it very addictive, and bell ringing became my hobby and I did a lot of bell ringing at university. I studied Physics, then I dropped out and started Computer Science, until I dropped out of that as well. I spent quite a long time at Nottingham University without getting a degree. Possibly, that was because I was spending too much of my time ringing bells rather than getting any work done.
The Gentle Author – Yet you have managed to fit all those things together in your career, how did you enter the industry of bell making?
Benjamin Kipling – There was a bell hanging company in Nottingham at the time, Hayward Mills. I got a holiday job with them and stayed for a couple of years. However, I discovered I was not keen on site work but I did like the theory behind the tuning of bells and, although Hayward Mills did not have a bell tuning machine, they were considering getting one. So when I dropped out from university, they took me on full time, doing admin and occasional bell hanging, with a view to me being the one who would do the tuning when they got a bell tuning machine which – a couple of years later – they did.
The Gentle Author – Are you a self-taught bell tuner?
Benjamin Kipling – Partly. I found some tuning graphs on the internet showing how the different partial tones respond according to where you take metal off a bell. But I had to teach myself how to drive the machine and how much metal to take off, which obviously is nerve-wracking and involves taking off tiny amounts to begin with and checking. Then you find the sound of the bell has hardly changed and so you take off a bit more, until you realise you actually have to take quite a bit of metal off to make any significant difference.
The Gentle Author – Did you ever take too much off?
Benjamin Kipling – The simple answer is ‘No.’ If you are gradually homing in on what you want, that should not be a problem. In practice, with four of the five partial tones, it is possible to go back up again if necessary. Generally, you are thinning the wall of the bell and making it more flexible so it vibrates at a lower frequency. Each time you take a little off, the notes go down. However, by taking more metal off the lip of the bell, it is possible to get four of those five to come back up. So there are usually ways of sorting these things out.
The Gentle Author – Do you find this rewarding work?
Benjamin Kipling – Oh absolutely, it is a lasting legacy. Hopefully my handiwork will be there for centuries because bells do not go out of tune. A lot of old bells were never in tune to begin with, they would just try and cast a bell as close as they could to the right note and, if it was a long way out, they would take out a hammer and chisel and try and chip bits off until it was bearable. That is the reason why old bells are retuned.
The Gentle Author – Is retuning a major part of your work?
Benjamin Kipling – Oh yes. At Whitechapel, probably half of the bells I tuned were old ones that came in for retuning.
The Gentle Author – How is that different?
Benjamin Kipling – The difference is that, whereas a new bell has been cast with enough metal in the right places to be able to do what you want, in an old bell the chances are there may not be enough metal in the places you need. You just have to try and push it in the right direction as much as you can. In the last few years, we tended to do more tuning of old bells on the outsides as well as on the insides and I found you can get much better results by doing that.
The Gentle Author – What are the oldest bells you have retuned?
Benjamin Kipling – Bells over a certain age tend to be listed for preservation.
The Gentle Author – They cannot be retuned?
Benjamin Kipling – It means there is a presumption against tuning, but different dioceses have a different interpretation of what that means. In some dioceses, you will never get permission to tune a listed bell, while in other dioceses – as long as you put a sensible case forward – they have no problem with you retuning anything of any age. The diocese that I have found which is most likely to give permission for tuning old bells is Bath & Wells. There were some bells in Bath & Wells diocese from the fourteenth, if not the thirteenth century, that I have tuned. The profile of bells and the composition of the bell metal has changed remarkably little in all those years.
The Gentle Author – Does bell tuning make you happy?
Benjamin Kipling – Absolutely, when people ask me what my job is, I like to see the expressions on their faces, ranging from disbelief that there could be such a job to complete fascination.
The Gentle Author – Tell me about the Royal Jubilee bells.
Benjamin Kipling – These were cast for St James Garlickhythe but first they were installed in a barge to go down the Thames as part of the Royal Jubilee pageant in 2012.
The Gentle Author – Where were you on that day?
Benjamin Kipling – I was close to St James Garlickhythe, struggling to get to the water’s edge to catch a view of them going past from the bank of the Thames, along with umpteen thousand other people, but the crowds were so deep that I missed them. The framework was fabricated at an engineering company in Edenbridge, so I did hear them and got to ring them on the frame in the works even if I never got to hear them on the river or see them in the barge. The sound of bells tends to bounce off water in a pleasing way. Certainly, I know the bells at St Magnus the Martyr at the northern end of London Bridge sound at their best if you stand just the other side of the river and I think the same is probably true of the Southwark Cathedral bells if you stand on the north bank. People told me my bells did sound very nice on the river.
Transcript by Rachel Blaylock
Click here to sign our petition to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
You may also like to read about
The Opening Of The Public Inquiry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
A Visit To The Bow Bells
The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry continues at 10am today, with live-tweeting at @savethewbf.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE INQUIRY
These are the bells of St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London which have good claim to be the most famous set of bells in the world, known as the Bow Bells. These are the bells that Dick Whittington heard in the fable, which seemed to call ‘Turn again Whittington, Thrice Lord Mayor!’ as he ascended Highgate Hill to depart the capital in 1392, inspiring his return to London to seek his fortune with the assistance of his celebrated cat. These are the bells that are so beloved of Cockneys that you must be born within the sound of Bow Bells to call yourself one of their crew. Naturally, these bells were cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the most famous bell foundry in the world.
Simon Meyer, Steeplekeeper at St Mary-le-Bow had to ascend Christopher Wren’s magnificent tower to change the clock to British Summer Time, which afforded me the opportunity to accompany him and view the bells for myself. When we arrived in the belfry, Simon leapt happily around upon the frame as if it were second nature to him yet I found it necessary to place my feet a little more deliberately as we negotiated the famous bells. ‘They’re about to ring,’ he announced at one moment, which filled my head with alarming thoughts of bells rotating in their frames but in fact turned out to be a clock chime which did not entail any movement of bells. Occasioning a reverberation within the belfry as powerful as the sound itself, this is not something I shall forget in a hurry.
The earliest record of the Bow Bells is from 1469 when the Common Council ordered a curfew rung each night at 9pm, marking the end of the apprentices’ working day. In 1588, Robert Greene compared Christopher Marlowe’s poetry to the sound of Bow Bells when he wrote, “for that I could make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow-Bell, daring God out of Heaven with that Atheist ‘Tamerlaine.'”
After the Great Fire, Christopher Wren rebuilt St Mary-le-Bow and the association with Whitechapel began in 1738 when Master Founder Thomas Lester recast the tenor bell. In 1762, he recast the other seven bells and added two more to make a set of ten that were first rung to celebrate George III’s twenty-fifth’s birthday.
In the twentieth century, the bells were restored by H. Gordon Selfridge, the department store entrepreneur, yet these were destroyed within eight years when the church was bombed during an air raid on May 10th 1941. Climbing the tower today, you are immediately aware that it is a reconstruction since the internal structure is of concrete, creating the strange impression of utilitarian bunker clad in seventeenth century stonework.
The current set of twelve bells were cast in Whitechapel in 1956 by Arthur Hughes, and Alan Hughes, the current Whitechapel Bell Founder, recalls being taken out of school for the day by his father to witness the casting. Every bell has an inscription from the psalms and the first letter of each spells out D WHITTINGTON.
It was the use of a 1927 recording of Bow Bells by the BBC during World War II that took them to the widest audience, broadcasting their sound to occupied countries across Europe as a symbol of hope. Even today, the sound of Bow Bells is broadcast globally as the interval signal by the BBC World Service, making these the most familiar bells on the planet. Bow Bells are the definitive London bells and the signature of the capital in sound.
FOUNDED BY ALBERT ARTHUR HUGHES OF THE WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY 1956
THE WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY LONDON
“‘I do not know,’ says the great bell of Bow’
The ringers’ chamber
St Paul’s viewed from the tower of St Mary-le-Bow
Erected in 1821, the Whittington Stone commemorates the spot on Highgate Hill where Dick Whittington heard the Bow Bells in 1392 and decided to return to London and seek his fortune
This sculpture of the cat was added in 1964
Sculpture of Dick Whittington and his cat at the Guildhall by Lawrence Tindall, 1999
St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, c.1900 (Courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
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Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
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Steve Dobkin, Bacon St Salvage
“People see a big guy, six foot tall with a bit of a growl on his face – but they don’t realise that when you get to know me, I really am a pleasant person.” confessed scrap dealer Steve Dobkin yesterday, as we sought refuge together in the warmth of the makeshift cubicle that serves as his office, squeezed between the piles of second-hand kitchen equipment which are the source of his livelihood. Yet such an apology was entirely unnecessary because Steve has a reputation as the gentle giant on Bacon St.
Operating from an eighty foot shed at the western extremity of the street, Steve always has an intriguing array of steel furniture standing on the pavement and if you enter his premises you find yourself surrounded by towers of it, receding into the gloom and piled up to the ceiling. Outside, on the wall facing the car park, is a magnificent ever-changing gallery of street art of which Steve is the patron. “I don’t understand it, but when they ask, I say ‘Do what you want.'” he admitted to me with a shy smile.
Last winter, the cold became too much for Steve, standing around in the tin shed all day in all weathers, so he build a wooden shack to keep himself warm. “I always thought, ‘Don’t have an office, you can put catering equipment there,’ but you’ve got to take care of yourself because none of us is getting any younger.” Steve confided, as the dusk gathered and the temperatures fell outside.
“My dad Sam Dobkin used to sell furniture down here in Brick Lane in the seventies, you could sell any furniture then as long as it was cheap. He was a scrap dealer always looking for an outlet. The first time I came down here was when I was around six years old, in 1972. I worked for him at weekends and holidays. I began selling off the back of a truck but I knew that – rather than selling it all for scrap – you could get more money if you had somewhere to keep it and resell it.
Nowadays, our stuff is all cleaned up and guaranteed, but in those days what you saw was what you got – just stuff straight out of a skip. It’s a form of progress, I work with electricians, gas fitters and water fitters to get everything repaired. People buy this way because it’s cheaper and they can see it working here. People like that extra bit of service. I try to give the customer what they want, if we can modify it by cutting equipment down to size, we will. You can spend fifty grand fitting out a kitchen or you can do it here for five.
I love my job. I love being here. I like getting up in the morning and coming here. When someone pulls up outside and you jump into the truck to take a look and make deal, that’s a buzz. I’m always thinking – Who’s calling up? – What am I going to be getting? – What am I going to be selling it for? Sometimes, they ring you up to sell a lot of flooring but when you get there you’re buying a lot of catering equipment – that’s a real buzz. That’s the kind of excitement you get.
You’ve got communities that come in here, they’ve got different ways to speak and you have to learn it. English people, they don’t bid for it, but Chinese and Turkish people they like to make a bid, whereas Indians will grind you into the ground if you let them. It’s different cultures, you stand your ground and be patient. No one community spends more money than another. And I’ve got to be friends with Indian people, they bring me curries. I never had so many curries since I came here. I never even had curry before I came here! You work with the people that turn up, you can’t start shouting and screaming or you’ll never make any money. I always try to find the best in everyone.
I had my first premises in 1990 in Grimsby St in one of the railway arches, next a place on Cheshire St and then one on the far side of Bacon St before I came here in 1999. I don’t know where the time has gone, but it’s been very good.
As soon as I get the right amount of money, I’ll be off – except I don’t know what the right amount of money is! You want to sell up and you think about what you’d do with the money, but then you think of all the things you’d miss. I’d miss getting up the morning and coming down here. I’m not interested in being rich, just happy with my little shop trickling along nice and easy. I have no website, no advertising and when I leave work, I switch my phone off. I don’t even like it when I get too many customers here. One day I’ll be the manager, the next day I’ll be out cleaning the cooker. I’ve got two people that work with me but I’m no better than anyone. My son Perry and daughter Louise work here with me too, but I wouldn’t take it on if I was them. They haven’t done it since six years old like I have, they don’t know the same love for it that I have.
I’ve come to like people more because of this job. I’ve no grudge against anyone. When I first came down here, it was hard – but as the years have gone by I have realised it is not personal. I’m trying to sell at the best price and they’re trying to get it as cheap as they can. All around this area, it’s a great place to work. The first three months you’re a newcomer – but after that, if your stall breaks everyone will come to help you. If you think you’re going to make fortune you won’t, instead you’ll discover a great sense of community.”
Photographs copyright © Jeremy Freedman
You may also like to read these other Bacon St stories
A Room To Let In Old Aldgate
I would dearly love to rent the room that is to let in this old building in Aldgate, photographed by Henry Dixon for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London. Too bad it was demolished in 1882. Instead I must satisfy myself with an imaginary stroll through the streets of that long lost city, with these tantalising glimpses of vanished buildings commissioned by the Society as my points of reference. Founded by a group of friends who wanted to save the Oxford Arms, threatened with demolition in 1875, the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London touched a popular chord with the pictures they published of age-old buildings that seem to incarnate the very soul of the ancient city. London never looked so old as in these atmospheric images of buildings forgotten generations ago.
Yet the melancholy romance of these ramshackle shabby edifices is irresistible to me. I need to linger in the shadows of their labyrinthine rooms, I want to scrutinize their shop windows, I long to idle in these gloomy streets – because the truth is these photographs illustrate an imaginary old London that I should like to inhabit, at least in my dreams. Even to a nineteenth century eye, these curious photographs would have proposed a heightened reality, because the people are absent. Although the long exposures sometimes captured the few that stood still, working people are mostly present only as shadows or fleeting transparent figures. The transient nature of the human element in these pictures emphasises the solidity of the buildings which, ironically, were portrayed because they were about to disappear too. Thus Henry Dixon’s photographs preserved in the Bishopsgate Insitute are veritable sonnets upon the nature of ephemerality – the people are disappearing from the pictures and the buildings are vanishing from the world, only the photographs themselves printed in the permanent carbon process survive to evidence these poignant visions now.
The absence of people in this lost city allows us to enter these pictures by proxy, and the sharp detail draws us closer to these streets of extravagant tottering old piles with cavernous dour interiors. We know our way around, not simply because the geography remains constant but because Charles Dickens is our guide. This is the London that he knew and which he romanced in his novels, populated by his own versions of the people that he met in its streets. The very buildings in these photographs appear to have personality, presenting dirty faces smirched with soot, pierced with dark eyes and gawping at the street.
How much I should delight to lock the creaky old door, leaving my rented room in Aldgate, so conveniently placed above the business premises of John Robbins, the practical optician, and take a stroll across this magical city, where the dusk gathers eternally. Let us go together now, on this cloudy October day, through the streets of old London. We shall set out from my room in Aldgate over to Smithfield and Clerkenwell, then walk down to cross the Thames, explore the inns of Southwark and discover where our footsteps lead …
This row of shambles was destroyed for the extension of the Metropolitan Railway from Aldgate to Tower Hill, 1883.
Sir Paul Pindar’s House in Bishopsgate was moved to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1890.
At the corner of St Mary Axe and Bevis Marks, this overhanging gabled house was destroyed in 1882.
In College Hill.
St Giles Cripplegate, which now stands at the centre of Barbican complex.
Old buildings in Aldersgate St.
Shaftesbury House by Inigo Jones in Aldersgate St, demolished after this photo was taken in 1882.
Chimneypiece in the Sessions House, Clerkenwell Green, where Dickens was once a cub reporter.
In Cloth Fair, next to Smithfield Market.
At the rear of St Bartholomew’s Church.
In the graveyard of St Bartholomew the Great.
In Charterhouse, Wash House Court.
The cloisters at Charterhouse.
St Mary Overy’s Dock
Queen’s Head Inn Yard.
White Hart Inn Yard.
King’s Head Inn Yard.
In Bermondsey St.
At the George, Borough High St.
You can see more pictures from the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London in The Ghosts of Old London and In Search of Relics of Old London.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Lyndon Osborn, Nurseryman
This pen portrait serves as a taster for my full profile of Lyndon Osborn published in theTelegraph today, including an account of ‘How to propagate pelargoniums.’
This is Lyndon Osborn, a noble nurseryman from New Zealand, who has been trading in Columbia Rd Market for twenty years – although he spent the first seven years nearby in Ezra St, while he worked his way up the waiting list for a pitch in the market. “I have been thirteen years in the firing line,” he declared with characteristic Antipodean bonhomie, “but I had already built up quite a big customer base round the corner – and now I’ve discovered many others who only walk along Columbia Rd.”
Twenty years ago, I bought one of the tree ferns from Lyndon, which remain his speciality to this day, and today a magnificent array of fine specimens line my garden path.
These extraordinary plants lie dormant, permitting the trunk alone to be transported, apparently a dried-out husk – until you add water and it regenerates, sprouting tendrils from the top and resuming vigorous life in a new continent. Over this time – just like his tree ferns – Lyndon himself has put down roots and shown dramatic growth too, establishing a nursery in High Barnet. And I have found that because Lyndon rears his seedlings in London, they are acclimatised to the conditions which improves their chances of thriving in my garden.
In particular, Lyndon has become famous for his spectacular pelargoniums, especially the deep crimson “Lord Bute,” which I have spied in many of the discerning gardens of the East End over recent summers. The copyright that exists on more recent strains sent Lyndon back to propagate nineteenth century cultivars, more hardy and pest resistant that their modern counterparts.
Starting from one trolley in Ezra St Market, Lyndon has now ascended to Alfred Dunhill in Mayfair. “Just as the nineteenth century aristocracy gave their gardeners free rein, these clients let me do what I want, and they love the idea of it being a small nursery, supplying plants grown up the road. I plant them up four times a year, and last time I was planting at Alfred Dunhill, someone from Claridges came to speak to me…” confided Lyndon proudly, his green eyes shining in eager anticipation of what might follow.
I thought of Lyndon when I visited the magnificent fern garden at Malplaquet House, so it was no surprise to discover that he supplied the ferns and is the principal plant supplier to Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, landscape designer and gardener to the Queen – collaborating on many of his projects.
Lyndon is a popular character in the market, renowned for his relaxed, droll humour and fascinating mixture of plants, always quick with a cheery greeting and eager to strike up a conversations with customers who share his horticultural enthusiasms.
“It has re-ignited my interest in London. I don’t come here to make money, it’s a social event. I’ve gone from meeting people as customers, who have become acquaintances and then friends,” admitted Lyndon with a sentimental smile, expressing his affection for Columbia Rd, “From here, everything has snowballed and that’s why I have such high regard for the market.”
Lyndon Osborn’s pelargonium “Lord Bute,” photographed in my garden last Summer.
Portrait of Lyndon Osborn copyright © Jeremy Freedman
John Claridge At Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry continues at 10am today, with live-tweeting at @savethewbf. To watch the inquiry, email elizabeth.humphrey@planninginspectorate.gov.uk
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,’ he told me. ‘There was a very tactile feeling about the place, where craftsmanship held sway, and my pictures pay testament to that feeling.’
Click here to sign our petition to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
You may also like to read about
The Opening Of The Public Inquiry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Adam Dant’s Bells of Whitechapel
Click here to order a copy of John Claridge’s EAST END for £25
Dorothy Rendell At Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry continues at 10am today, with live-tweeting at @savethewbf. To watch the inquiry, email elizabeth.humphrey@planninginspectorate.gov.uk
Artist Dorothy Rendell was fascinated by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and made frequent visits over the years to record the life of this celebrated institution. Significantly, in her drawings Dorothy chose to focus upon the African-Caribbean and Asian workers who rarely appear in photographs of the foundry. These pictures are selected from the Dorothy Rendell Archive at Bishopsgate Institute.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
Click here to sign our petition to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
You may also like to read about
The Opening Of The Public Inquiry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
