Courtyard at Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY AND WESTMINSTER HALL
The cracked bell of Big Ben was repaired in the workshop where it was cast: the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in the East End, which continues to thrive today and claims to be the oldest manufacturing company in Britain. Its location is hardly hidden, being on the teeming Whitechapel Road, but the workshops are a cave of secrets, and sometimes open to visitors. The foundry is in same building it occupied in 1670, after the Great Fire of London, and its history dates back at least 100 years before that. Among thousands of bells made at Whitechapel were the Liberty Bell, supplied to Philadelphia in 1752, and the famous Bow Bells of St Mary-le-Bow at Cheapside. During the 1930s the business struggled to survive. It was contracts awarded by the Admiralty to cast alloy components for submarines during the Second World War, which proved to be a lifeline. A spate of repair work on war-damaged bells kept the Foundry busy during the 1950s. Today at Whitechapel Bell Foundry craftsmen still work with metal, wood sand and clay, and still use horsehair and manure for moulds. The building is crammed with new construction and repair work and hand bells are a speciality.
Inside, around the entrance door, remain the outline patterns for Big Ben, and the gauge that was used to profile its mould, called a strickle, hangs above the furnaces. Big Ben is still the largest bell ever to have been cast there.
Early twentieth-century tuning forks, used when bells were tuned by hammer and a chisel.
Casting bells for the parish church of Herne in Kent.
In the shadow of Big Ben’s tower stands Westminster Hall, a key building in English history, which survived the 1834 fire. The building, in its day the largest in Europe, was begun in 1097 and measures a mighty 240 67 ft (73 20 m). The hall is remarkable for its architecture and for the historical events that have taken place within it. The hammerbeam roof, considered a miracle of medieval craftsmanship, was commissioned by Richard II during his reconstruction of the hall in the late fourteenth century. By bitter irony, the hall was then the scene of Richard’s overthrow in 1399. It was also the setting for the trial of Charles I prior to his execution in 1649. In more recent centuries the hall has become the site for the lying-in-state of outstanding Prime Ministers, such as William Gladstone and Winston Churchill, and members of the Royal Family, including the Queen Mother in 2002. Below Westminster Hall lies the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft.
