Taylor'S Bell Foundry (That Part On East Side Of Cobden Street)

Taylor's Bell Foundry (East Side of Cobden Street)

This foundry forms part of a bell manufactory dating to around 1874, with later alterations and additions. It incorporates a hand bell foundry, girder store, and a site museum added in 1985. The buildings are constructed in red brick laid to English bond with blue brick dressings, and feature Welsh slate and corrugated asbestos roof coverings.

The complex has an L-shaped plan, with the main foundry hall running east to west and extensions to the rear gable. To the south, facing the street, are a small enclosed yard and the girder store. The main foundry hall facing Freehold Street is a tall single-storey building of five bays, measuring 100 by 40 feet, set back from the street behind a tall arch-headed double doorway. It has stepped buttresses between window openings and four chimneys serving the former side wall furnaces. The rear elevation comprises seven bays with multi-pane cast iron windows set within blue brick arched heads. The eaves feature moulded brick and dentilled detailing, with a full-length ridge louvre. At the east end, the gable has an arch-headed window at the apex and a corner chimney. Extending from the gable is the main drying oven with a shallow pitched roof. To the north stands the taller hand bell foundry with two gable stacks, the wider bearing a painted sign reading "TAYLOR BELL FOUNDERS". This building has three tall windows with multi-pane cast iron frames to the north wall. To its left is a lower range with three similar windows and a Welsh slate roof, while to its right is a two-storey range with moulded brick eaves and corrugated asbestos roof, featuring a tall 24-pane window to the ground floor facing Freehold Street. The left-hand fenestration is irregular, while the right-hand side facing Cobden Street has two 30-pane windows with cambered brick heads and a double doorway. To the rear is a further tall single-storey range with moulded brick eaves, Welsh slate roof covering, and coped gables, with a double doorway facing Cobden Street. The rear of the main range mirrors the front, with one window blocked and various blocked openings below other windows.

The interior comprises a single working casting hall with the smaller hand bell foundry and the main drying oven at its east end. The roof is carried on lightweight strutted metal trusses dating to 1927. A metal viewing gallery installed in 1985 spans the tall segmental arch-headed double doorway in the west gable. The north side wall contains the mouths of the original foundry reverbatory furnaces, set within semi-circular arch-headed recesses, with the furnace chambers now enclosed as part of the museum area beyond. A twentieth-century travelling crane, supported on steel beams carried by brick piers integral to the side walls, runs through the hall. The south side houses two free-standing twentieth-century furnaces used for melting bell metal. The smaller hand bell foundry at the east end contains small crucible furnaces and plain fixed timber benching beneath the north windows. To the south is the main drying oven with a large framed and braced door.

The Taylor family, originally bell founders in St. Neots and elsewhere, came to Loughborough in 1839. In 1858, J.W. Taylor purchased this site and began constructing new foundry buildings. A pre-1886 engraved letterhead shows the buildings as similar in appearance to those existing today, including the part on the east side of Cobden Street, with three stacks. The business prospered and was reported to have been at one time the largest bell foundry in the world. Taylor's cast bells for St Paul's Cathedral, London, including in 1881 "Great Paul"—the largest bell in the former British Empire and the largest properly rung bell in the world. The moulds for this bell survive in the rear yard to the hand bell foundry. Bells and carillons have been exported from this foundry throughout the former Empire, to the USA, and to Holland. It is the only operational purpose-built bell foundry in England and one of only two bell foundries remaining in the country. This building forms a group with the part of Taylor's Bell Foundry to the west side of Cobden Street.