Profile
There is a building on Freehold Street in Loughborough that has been making noise heard around the world since 1859. The bells cast inside it have rung at the end of world wars, at royal coronations, at the opening ceremony of an Olympic Games, and on the opening track of one of the best-selling rock albums ever recorded. John Taylor & Co — Taylor’s Bell Foundry — is the world’s largest working bell foundry, and it belongs to Loughborough in a way that very few institutions belong to any town.
After years of anxiety about its future — leaking roofs, crumbling brickwork, a near-fatal administration in 2009, and a long stint on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register — the foundry has emerged from the most significant restoration in its history with its buildings secured, its museum transformed, and its carillon tower being rebuilt bell by bell. For anyone who has walked past the foundry on Freehold Street and wondered what goes on behind those Victorian walls, Loughborough now has one of its most compelling visitor attractions fully open to the public. The story of how it got here is worth knowing.
Six Centuries of Bellmaking — and 185 Years in Loughborough
The tradition of bellmaking that lives at Freehold Street stretches back to a man named Johannes de Stafford, who was casting bells in medieval Leicester in the 14th century. The Taylor family entered the picture in 1784, and by 1839 John Taylor had established himself in Loughborough, winning the contract to recast the bells at All Saints’ Church. The orders poured in. By 1859 the business had outgrown its original site and moved to the purpose-built foundry on what is now Freehold Street — the same foundry that stands today, Grade II* listed, a Victorian manufacturing complex that has been used continuously for its original purpose for 167 years.
Over those 167 years, more than 25,000 bells have been cast here and shipped to over 100 countries. The range is staggering. Single bells for village churches. Carillons of 50 or more for American universities. The great bourdon bells that define the sonic character of Britain’s most famous cathedrals.
The Bells That Made Loughborough Famous
If you want to understand the scale of what Taylor’s has achieved, consider the roll call of bells that left Freehold Street:
Great Paul, cast in 1881 for St Paul’s Cathedral in London, weighs 17,002 kilograms — more than 17 tonnes. It is the largest bell ever cast in the British Isles and the second heaviest bell in the United Kingdom. When it was made, it was considered one of the greatest feats of industrial casting in Victorian England.
Great George, cast in 1940 for Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, weighs nearly 15 tonnes and is the third largest bell in the UK. The Olympic Bell, cast for the London 2012 Games opening ceremony, is the heaviest tuned bell in the world. It was inscribed with a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises.”
And then there is the bell that introduced Taylor’s to an entirely different audience. In 1980, rock band AC/DC commissioned a 2,000-pound cast bronze bell from the Loughborough foundry for their Back in Black tour — the bell that opens “Hells Bells”, one of the most recognisable sounds in rock history. The album has sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Every one of those listeners heard, whether they knew it or not, the work of craftsmen on a Leicestershire street.
Near-Death, Rescue, and a £6 Million Restoration
For all its extraordinary output, Taylor’s came close to disappearing entirely. In September 2009, the company went into administration. The centuries-old tradition of bellmaking at Loughborough was, for a brief and alarming period, genuinely at risk of being lost. A consortium called UK Bell Foundries Ltd stepped in and bought the business out of administration, stabilising it — but the Victorian buildings themselves remained in serious trouble.
By 2014, Historic England had placed the foundry on its Heritage at Risk Register. Roofs were collapsing. Rain was pouring in. The infrastructure was deteriorating faster than it could be repaired. English Heritage provided an emergency grant of £1 million to prevent the worst of the structural damage. It was not enough to solve the problem — but it bought time.
The turning point came in 2020, when the Loughborough Bellfoundry Trust — a charitable incorporated organisation established in 2016 to preserve the buildings, archives, and museum — secured a grant of £3.45 million from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Combined with a further £835,000 from the government’s Loughborough Town Deal Fund and donations from bell ringers and supporters worldwide, the total restoration budget reached £6 million.
The work took four years. Virtually every roof on the western section of the site was replaced. A chimney was repointed and reinforced. A gable end that was at risk of falling into the street was stabilised. The museum was completely refurbished, with new educational facilities and improved access. A ceremony marking the completion of the project was held in October 2024.
In November 2025, Historic England confirmed that the western side of the site — including the central workshop, the tuning facilities, the boardroom, and the main courtyard — had been removed from the Heritage at Risk Register. Ben Robinson from Historic England described it as “a long old road.” The foundry’s own trustee noted that what had been “a collection of small rooms filled with various lathes, machinery, and accumulated items over the centuries” had been transformed into “a beautiful and bright” boardroom under new skylights.
The Carillon Tower: Loughborough’s Second Set of Bells
Work is not finished. In August 2025, restoration began on the foundry’s campanile — the bell tower erected in 1906, which has deteriorated over the decades and is now being rebuilt as part of the broader site revival.
The tower houses a carillon, a musical instrument consisting of bells played from a keyboard. At present it holds 18 bells. When the restoration is complete — expected later in 2026 — it will hold 48 bells on a newly constructed frame, incorporating bells sourced from a decommissioned church in Canada, bells gathered from various locations, and newly cast bells made on site. Simon Adams, the foundry’s commercial and sales director, pointed out that this will give Loughborough something genuinely unusual: two carillons. The other sits in the tower at Queen’s Park, serving as the town’s war memorial.
“This tower is undoubtedly a landmark for this community,” Mr Adams said. “It will be quite unusual for a town to have two carillons.”
Our Take: Loughborough Has Something the World Cannot Replicate
It is easy, living in a town, to walk past extraordinary things without registering them. Loughborough residents pass the foundry on Freehold Street as they go about their day, and most probably give it little thought. They should give it more.
There is nowhere else on earth quite like Taylor’s Bell Foundry. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London — which cast the original Liberty Bell and Big Ben — closed in 2017 after 450 years, its future still uncertain despite ongoing attempts at revival. Taylor’s is now the last of its kind in the UK and the largest working foundry of its type anywhere in the world. The craft practised inside those Victorian brick walls — the moulding, the casting, the tuning of bronze to musical precision — is essentially unchanged from the techniques used to cast Great Paul in 1881.
The £6 million restoration is, in that context, not just a local heritage project. It is the preservation of a global irreplaceable. The National Lottery money that went into those roofs is not preserving a curiosity — it is maintaining the only place in Britain where this particular form of human knowledge and craft is still alive and commercially active.
For Loughborough itself, the foundry is an asset that the town has not always known how to talk about. This is a place where AC/DC came to commission a bell. Where the bells of St Paul’s, York Minster, Liverpool Cathedral, and a hundred other great buildings were made. Where a new carillon is being assembled bell by bell for a tower that will ring out over the town for the next century. That is not a footnote in local history. It is the story of what Loughborough is.
The museum is open Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 4pm, and on the first Saturday of each month. Tours of the working foundry run regularly. If you have never been, go. It is, as more than one visitor has put it, like stepping back in time — except that everything around you is still very much alive.
Have Your Say
Have you visited Taylor’s Bell Foundry — or are you a Loughborough resident who has never been through the doors? Do you think the foundry gets the recognition it deserves as a world-class institution? Leave a comment below and let us know. Sign up for our free local updates to follow the ongoing carillon restoration and all heritage and culture news from across Loughborough and Charnwood.
