Ring the Changes: Where England's Bells Hang. A Data Study of Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers

Change ringing on bells hung for full-circle ringing is an English invention of the seventeenth century and remains overwhelmingly English. I use the open data of Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers, published by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers under CC BY-SA 4.0, to describe every ring of three or more bells it lists: 7,262 rings holding 45,682 bells, with records for 45,974 individual bells. 93% of the rings are in England. Against OpenStreetMap's Anglican churches, 40% of churches in England and Wales have a ring, from 73% in Northamptonshire to 6% in Gwynedd. Six-bell rings are the norm (41%); rings of ten and twelve are recent, with 89% of twelves containing a bell cast since 1950. The median bell in a ring was cast in 1876, but 1,376 bells are dated or judged to be medieval, and the oldest bell with a single cast year is dated 1317. The Whitechapel and Taylor foundry families cast 49% of all bells now hanging in rings. Bells by year of casting trace national history: the peak years are Victoria's Diamond and Golden Jubilees (443 and 388 bells, about twice the surrounding years), the coronation of 1937 doubles its neighbours, and no surviving ring bell was cast in 1943 or 1944. Because Dove records only bells that survive in rings, these are patterns of survival as well as of founding. Bell data: Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers, Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, dove.cccbr.org.uk, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes were made: cleaning, parsed cast dates, summaries and counties. This work is not endorsed by the Central Council. Churches: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), counts only. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/ring-the-changes/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/ring-the-changes. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/ring-the-changes/.