London’s church bells: which towers practise on which night, and what the bells sound like

A band of ringers is practising. Each bell in a ring is rung by one person with a rope, so a tower of eight bells needs eight ringers, and the skill belongs to the band. The Central Council of Church Bell Ringers says most ringers practise once or twice a week and also ring before or after the Sunday service. Dove’s Guide, the ringers’ own database of towers, says it works on the basis that most practices start at around 7.30 pm.

Of the 169 ringable rings in Greater London and the City that Dove’s Guide lists, 100 name a practice night: 25 on Monday, 24 on Tuesday, 20 on Wednesday, 22 on Thursday, 5 on Friday and 6 on Sunday. None names a Saturday. A further 3 say only “by arrangement” or send you to the tower’s website, and 66 list nothing; at 10 of those Dove notes that ringing is suspended, stopped or not permitted, and for the rest a blank does not mean the bells are silent. Two towers name a second day, so the days add up to more than 100. All but a few of the listed practices are weeknight evenings: a handful fall at lunchtime or in the afternoon, and all six Sunday practices fall between noon and half past five.

You rarely hear a tune. You hear bells rung in a pattern that changes row by row, which is the next thing to see.

CCCBR: learning to ring · Dove’s Guide: FAQ · Dove’s Guide data

The simplest thing a band can do is ring its bells in order, from the highest to the lowest, again and again. Ringers call that rounds. Dove’s Guide assumes the bells of a ring are tuned to a major scale, so rounds is that scale heard from the top down.

Then the order changes. From one row to the next no bell moves more than one place, so that a heavy bell swinging on a full wheel can follow. A rule that keeps producing new rows without repeating one is a method, written as a line of place notation. In the ringing room above, the red line follows bell 1, the treble, and the blue line follows the bell you choose.

Plain Bob Major on eight bells takes 112 changes to bring the bells back to rounds; Cambridge Surprise Major takes 224. Both figures are computed here from the Central Council’s place notation, with a check that every row is different and the bells end in rounds.

The rhythm has a hitch built in. After every second row the ringers leave a pause, nominally the length of one bell striking: the handstroke gap. The Association of Ringing Teachers puts a typical row at about two seconds; at the Steady pace a row of eight lasts about the same.

The count of possible rows grows fast: 5,040 on seven bells, 40,320 on eight, 479,001,600 on twelve. A book on ringing from 1668, Tintinnalogia, written by Richard Duckworth and printed for “F.S.”, the initials of Fabian Stedman, already tabulated them (the printing linked below is the one of 1671). For twelve bells it reckoned seventy-five years, ten months, one week and three days of ringing at 720 changes an hour. “The Ninth Bell Needs Eight Days Without a Pause” on this site works through that arithmetic.

The phrase was already used figuratively in 1614, when the preacher Thomas Adams wrote of “Phisitians” who “ring the Changes of opinions”.

Central Council methods library · ART: accuracy statistics · Harrison: striking · Tintinnalogia (1671 printing) · Adams, The Deuills Banket (1614) · The Ninth Bell Needs Eight Days Without a Pause

The earliest printing found, in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (1744), is titled “London Bells”. It names Whitechapel, Aldgate and St Katharine’s, then “Oranges and Lemmons” at St Clement’s, the Old Bailey, Fleet Ditch, Stepney and the great bell at St Paul’s. St Martin’s, Shoreditch and Bow are not in it. All three are in print by 1810, in Gammer Gurton’s Garland, where St Martin’s says “Halfpence and farthings”. The candle and the chopper are in none of the 1744, 1810 or 1843 texts; they appear in the fifth edition of Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England, reprinted in 1886.

Beyond “great Bell at Pauls” in 1744, no early text says which church each line means, so the matches above are the traditional ones.

St Clement Danes first rang the tune on 31 March 1920, the day of its first Oranges and Lemons service for the children of the parish. The church’s website says the bells play it on the hour from 8 am to 9 pm, and in the same place says that bell ringing there is paused during restoration of the steeple (page read on 1 October 2026).

Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, 1744 (Wikisource) · Gammer Gurton’s Garland (Gutenberg) · Halliwell, 1843 · Halliwell, fifth edition (1886 reprint) · St Clement Danes: the bells

Dove’s Guide links a website for 159 of the 178 towers, and its FAQ suggests looking for the tower’s own website first. The Association of Ringing Teachers advises towers to tell visitors not to touch the ropes unless invited to, under supervision, and not to approach ringers while they are ringing. One ART teacher warns that on a busy practice night a learner may get only five to ten minutes of focused ringing, so ask the band when to come.

Learning takes several weeks before you ring with the band, according to the Central Council. The Council’s 1988 survey found about 41,000 ringers; in 2022 its president wrote that the number was thought to be under 35,000. The Council is running a census of ringers on 16–22 November 2026.

Dove’s Guide: FAQ · ART: tower visits · ART: learn to ring · CCCBR: learning to ring · CCCBR president’s blog, 2022 · CCCBR: census 2026