Change Ringing Corpus · First analytical output

Who cast the bells,
and where

Seven centuries of English bellfounding, mapped from — surviving bells whose founder is known — then joined to the methods first rung on them. Three separately maintained corpora, linked for the first time.

—

bells attributed

—

towers

1290–2026

casting years

22,111

peals tower-linked

I · Territory

Foundries had catchment areas, and you can see them

Each dot is a tower, placed by its own coordinates and coloured by the foundry tradition that cast most of its bells. All 12,428 towers are shown in one colour to begin with, because eight hues scattered across a map is unreadable — select a tradition and it lights up against the rest. Then drag the slider back through the centuries.

Earliest attributed bell cast by 2026

Rudhall of Gloucester is the clearest case: a dense cluster through Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and the Welsh marches, and almost nothing beyond it. The firm cast 2,745 surviving bells between 1679 and 1835 without ever becoming national. Loughborough and Whitechapel, by contrast, are everywhere — the railways let them be.

II · Succession

Two foundries outlived everyone else

Surviving bells by quarter-century and tradition. This counts bells still hanging, not bells cast — losses, recastings and wartime scrap fall out of the record, so the deep past is thinner than it truly was.

Bells surviving today, by quarter-century of casting. Hover any segment for its tradition, period and count.

III · The cross-corpus join

Where new methods get rung first

This is the question that needs all three sources at once: Dove's founder records, joined to bells, joined to towers, joined to the CCCBR Methods Library's first-performance history. It asks whose bells ringers chose when trying something that had never been rung before.

Distinct methods whose first tower-bell peal was rung on a ring containing bells by that tradition. A ring often mixes founders, so a peal can count for more than one.

Loughborough's 8,306 is partly its own doing: John Taylor & Co's Bell Foundry Tower in Loughborough is itself the single most-used tower for method first-peals, at 507. A foundry that keeps a ring on site gets to host the experiments.

IV · The traditions

Eight houses

Dove groups individual firms into foundry traditions, which is what makes this legible: “Loughborough” absorbs thirteen successive businesses, from John Taylor's arrival in 1786 to the present day.