I wanted my hundredth post about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to be an announcement that Robert Jenrick had instructed the new owner of the Bell Foundry to keep it as a Bell Foundry, something he could so easily have done. No such luck.

Instead, I am posting the inscriptions on a bell I noticed recently in the reception spaces of the London Hospital:-

Thomas Lester had been foreman to Richard Phelps and took over from him as the owner of the Bell Foundry following Phelps’s death in August 1738. It was Lester who began construction of the current Foundry, soon to be brutalised, in 1738. He made one of the peel of the bells of Westminster Abbey and inscribed it THOMAS LESTER OF LONDON MADE ME AND WITH THE REST I WILL AGREE.

In 1757, he made a bell which he donated to the nearby London Hospital as an act of civic generosity.

I found it very moving, the sense of interconnectedness in Whitechapel history, which Jenrick in 2021 post-COVID has tossed into the dustbin, aided and abetted by the Commissioners of Historic England who should hang their heads in shame.