Bells on Sunday: St Anne’s Limehouse
December 3rd, 2007 by Steve BowbrickI think of you all as vigorous early risers so there’s a strong chance you’ll have heard this yesterday morning at 05:43. Bells on Sunday is another of those Radio 4 institutions that’s probably impossible to abolish, no matter how far out to the fringes of the schedule it’s pushed.
Someone (I visualise an elderly sound-recordist in a Morris Oxford with a huge valve-operated tape recorder) travels to a different parish church each week and records its bells. That’s it (there’s an archive of the last three years’ bells too. Sounds like material for a mash-up to me).
I particularly liked this one because I used to live not far from St Anne’s (a gorgeous white stone Hawskmoor job that’s got the full magical/alchemical/allegorical treatment from both Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair in recent years) and often heard the bells on a quietish Sunday morning (MP3).
December 4th, 2007 at 12:47 am
nice one ; )
the day some haircut decides to “regenerate” the beeb in time for London 2012 is the day i self-immolate on the green at Westminster
December 9th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
This is perhaps the most Radio Fourish thing on Radio 4. Wonderful.
December 10th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Yep. I too love the bells being a radio 4/world service on all night type of sleeper..
And there’s an archive here of all the recordings between 2002 and 2004 (when the BBC archive kicks in) or rather an archive of where and how they were recorded.
http://www.btinternet.com/~copson/BBC_Bells_diary_2003.htm