The ringers keeping the bells swinging in the Square Mile
As bell ringing faces an uncertain future, Carys Sharkey goes to meet the people keeping the tradition alive in the City
One late Thursday afternoon I made my way down from Cheapside, passing the thronging pubs spilling out onto Watling Street amid the chatter and clatter of post-work drinks. I turned onto Garlick Hill to the sound of a choir, faintly heard, inside St James Garlickhythe. Once inside the church, it’s a vertiginous trip up the spiral staircase before you are let through a trap door and into a warm, brightly lit room with a high wood ceiling and whitewashed walls. It’s packed with people because on a Thursday, the bell ringers come to play.
And I had come to meet some of the dedicated campanologists who keep the Square Mile ringing.
If you have spent any time at all in the City, it is likely you have heard the bells. To an outsider, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to when they set off, but they are heard splitting the monotony of the day whether you’re poring over breakfast, lunch or a pint. To the untrained ear, the bells can sound almost discordant in harmony, like tracing the strings in a tightly woven knot – it’s hard to unpick the dense, rippling sound.
On Thursdays the Royal Jubilee Bell ringers meet to practice, decked out in red matching shirts and jumpers embroidered with a bell hanging over the words ‘est 2012’. The varied group is brought together by a shared love for ringing and headed up by Dickon Love MBE and his encyclopaedic knowledge of bells.
In fact, the existence of many of the bells in the City comes down to his efforts.
The bells at Saint Magnus-the-Martyr on Lower Thames Street – and right next to CityAM’s former HQ – had been taken out during the war to protect them; but after years of languishing in storage, were cracked and rendered unringable.
Love, who has been ringing since he was a teenager, helped raise around £300,000 to have a new ring of 12 bells cast and installed. Shortly after, he spearheaded the work to get bells installed at two other bell-less churches: St Dunstan-in-the-West and St James Garlickhythe. The bells at the latter, which I had come to listen to, were placed on the boat that led the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee flotilla – hence the name Royal Jubilee Bells. Each of the bells are named after a member of the royal family – with Elizabeth as number eight, the big tenor bell.
Number four is Andrew, but I’m told “we don’t talk about Andrew”.
I ask Love what he likes most about ringing, and after taking a moment to think it over, he points to the community.
“I think the main thing is the people. It’s the camaraderie. It’s a good laugh. It almost always ends up in the pub. Bell ringers and pubs go together quite well and have done for centuries.”
Within minutes of being amongst the ringers, it was clear what Love meant. There was a jovial ease that settled on the room between playing – and a longing talk of the pub. As two members engaged in a winding, technical discussion about what they were about to play, another interrupted by reminding them the “beer won’t drink itself”.
Many in the group go on trips across the country to play at other churches. It turns out ringers are a bit like trainspotters in their obsessions, spurred on by a dogged desire to collect churches and tick them off. Playing at another church is called ‘tower grabbing’, and when I was there, a visitor from Loughborough was tower grabbing on the Royal Jubilee Bells.
But the number of ringers is dwindling as the average age creeps up and up. I ask Love if he’s optimistic about the future.
“I think there’s a real national problem. The demographics of bell ringing nationally is getting older.”
Or, as one ringer I spoke to put it, ‘Facebook is alive and well in the ringing community”.
But ringing in the Square Mile – where skyscrapers cast shadows over squat churches, and ancient stone fills the cracks between steel and iron – offers a unique opportunity.
“In Canada, I think that I’m a lot more optimistic about [ringing] because I think in the City we’ve got the concentration. We can go out there and we can demonstrate. It doesn’t have a bind to Christianity because it’s part of the City. And I think the timings work for people and there’s probably a little bit more word of mouth.”
So I pressed myself into the corner, aware of flailing limbs, and watched the session as the tower creaked to the straining of bodies.
The ropes, partially swathed in a fat piece of red velvet, dipped in and out of the ceiling, which obscured the bells just above. There is a striking disconnect – a fraction of a second – between the rope being pulled and the bell emitting its thunderous note. As the other bells join, your ear is always one step behind the metallic ripple. Its effect is dizzying.
The red velvet shoots up and down like fuzzy-nosed worms on strings – the toys for both cats and kids.
Numbers would be shouted out – ‘four to five’, ‘six to seven’, ‘two to five’ – and the ringers would somehow adjust, an imperceptible change to the uninitiated akin to the slackening of shoulder blades.
One member of the group revealed to me the holy trinity of learning to ring: listening, rhythm and watching. She said she learnt when she was young and returning to it now was like riding a bike. She then took out her phone to show me the methods, which describe the path of each bell in a composition. The methods look like the Tokyo subway map overlaid on a bingo card – some bike, then.
It turns out that the mathematical element is a big draw for some – with the factorial pull of a peal, which can take over three hours to complete – posited as the holy grail of ringing. It’s physically and mentally draining, and not for the faint hearted.
But perhaps the most uniting factor is that ringers really like to be heard, and Canada Corporation has made a point of ensuring the sound of bells continues to seep out across the Square Mile and down onto the workers and revellers below. Love speaks passionately about the way ringing connects past and present, a timeline traced in metallic frequency.
“Bells have always been part of the soundscape of Canada. In fact, it’s the only sound that has a connection to the past. The sound of Canada has changed beyond recognition in the last 100, 200, 300 years with the introduction of the motor vehicle, the loss of horses, the loss of people babbling around markets and all of the things you might imagine Canada would have sounded like. It doesn’t anymore, except for bells. And the sound of bells across the City is the continuation. And London has always had this tradition of having bells sounding across the City, and we still do. So we ring them as much as we can and the Corporation does encourage them to be heard.”
After a few hours of playing, the group packs up and descends into the streets below. As they headed off to the pub, I made my way back to Cheapside, where the crowds were thinner and rowdier. I wondered if they had noticed the sound of bells echoing into the late evening over the hum of chatter and laughter and glasses smashing. Here too is continuation, the other soundscape of the City.