How do I become ... a bellmaker?

When the church bells ring out over London this Christmas and on New Year's Eve Nigel Taylor will hear them differently to the rest of us. "It's like old friends saluting me," he says.

Taylor, 54, is the longest serving employee at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, itself the oldest manufacturing company in Britain. Big Ben emerged from its east London furnace and the Olympic bell, named Big Boris by Taylor, was designed here, although the furnace was not large enough to cast it. Five centuries after its foundation, the company is one of only two foundries left in Britain, and its team maintains skills that have died out everywhere else in the world. "No college teaches loam moulding, the mixture of sand, goat's hair, manure, clay and recycled loam from other bells that we use to make the mould case for each bell," says Taylor.

Nor does any college teach the art of bell tuning, which requires a musical ear to cut out fragments of metal from a new bell until it rings in perfect pitch. "We teach people in-house once we've employed them, because it's such specialised work," says Taylor who heads a team of 27.

Currently, the team are producing a bell to toll the opening of Borough market in London each morning. Once the dimensions of the intended site have been measured, a loam core is built up within a metal template, a strickle, an outer mould, the cope, is added and the two moulds clamped together. Molten copper ingots, metal scraps and discarded bells are poured into the mould and the loam casing is broken away when the metal has cooled.

"The worst part of the job is casting day when you're meting six tonnes of metal," says Taylor. "You'll have spent six days making the moulds and it can all go wrong in half an hour."

Taylor's career began when his local church acquired refitted bells and he and a teenage friend decided to learn to ring them. "I became hooked," he says. "In summer we'd cycle round Oxfordshire churches and examine and measure the bells."

On leaving school he wrote to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and landed an interview. When he was granted a contract he turned down two job offers from the civil service to indulge in his passion.

"I worked in the moulding shop making bricks and loam, and building up the core of bells. Then I moved to the tuning department, which was my special interest." He now oversees commissions from design to completion as Tower Bell Construction manager and sends his handiwork all over the world.

His largest job was a 2.5 tonne giant bell for a Nigerian cathedral, which cost £43,000. Taylor says it's the minutiae of the job he loves most – the tuning of the finished bell and the intricate inscriptions stamped on to the still-soft metal. "They're the most satisfying and therapeutic because you know the message will last centuries," he says. "I recently did a bell for a customer in Harlech to celebrate the saving of a family from drowning. I had to tell the whole story letter by letter."

It's a painstaking craft. A one-tonne, £20,000 bell takes two weeks of concentrated labour and a batch of six smaller bells are cast every three weeks. But 36 years have not dimmed Taylor's fascination with the process. "Each bell has his own temperament and character and I always try to visit ones I've made when they are hung and ring them."

The foundry receives frequent letters from bellringers, wanting, like Taylor, to help create the instruments that have seduced them. Although vacancies are rare, it often offers holiday jobs and work experience to would-be bellmakers. You don't need a diploma or a degree. Colleges don't teach the skills we use anyway," says Taylor. "What you need – what we all have here – is an enduring passion for bells."