Otto SS has sent me the attached advert for the Bell Foundry with a nicely abstracted view of the bells of Liverpool Cathedral, installed in the 1930s. The Bell Foundry tends to be associated with historic bells – the city churches, St. Paul’s, the Liberty Bell, Big Ben. It’s nice to see an image of its twentieth-century incarnation.

Factum Foundation is making bells – but not at the Bell Foundry because Historic England thought it was more exciting for the Bell Foundry to be turned into a boutique hotel than remain a Bell Foundry.

It’s what they call ‘adaptive re-use’. The only problem is that the boutique hotel hasn’t happened. So, they have allowed – and indeed encouraged – a historic building to decay, not what I regard as their statutory function.