EXPLORING ENGLAND'S BELFRIES
A Pictorial Essay

Photographs by Christopher Dalton : Notes and introduction by Richard Jones

November 2019, hardback, 232 pp., 104 photographs, 297 x 230mm
ISBN: 978-1-905622-57-3

 ***CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE***

Christopher Dalton (1941–2008) has been described as 'one of the greatest post-war photographers of historic buildings'. He was also a distinguished archaeologist of bells and belfries. This book, with more than one hundred superbly evocative black-and-white photographs in high-quality reproduction, celebrates his work portraying churches in their landscape settings, tower exteriors and interiors, historic bell frames, and a chronological sequence of bells and their ornamentation.

It is not widely known that England's belfries contain a rich heritage of bells by a great variety of makers of all periods, including some very fine examples of mediaeval bell-founding. In these pages one can trace the outline of this craft tradition, from a remarkable 11th-century survival to a product of the Victorian industrialised bell-trade.

The sequence of photographs has been put together by Richard Jones, a fellow bell-lover who assisted the photographer on many belfry visits. He has also provided an introductory essay and an appendix of notes giving background to the bells and belfries represented.