To HATE the church bells?

🙄 it’s bell ringing practice for goodness sake. These are the people who move next to the village green and complain about the cricket. So bloody selfish.

This is the same as people who complain about school noise when they choose to live next door to a school!

YABU, the church was there first. And the types of churches that have these sorts of bells are hard to miss. It's not their fault you didn't do your due diligence.

Personally, I love listening to church bells, but I grew up just down the road from a busy village church, so perhaps I'm just used to it.

Oh good grief. So you did little research about your new house and are annoyed by a traditional village practice. YABU. Daft and selfish.

I'm a former bellringer.
Practice is usually 1.5hrs - 2hrs per week
Ring for services, weddings & special occasions.

At this time of year bellringing teams often visit other churches to try out different bells.

You are being so unreasonable it's laughable

You may well zone out the noise sometime soon, but I think practice twice a week IS unreasonable. There's a fashion for 'ringing centres' at the moment as a way of recruiting and retaining new ringers, which tends to mean more weekly practice nights. That's not fair on the affected neighbours, so you could request via the PCC or Churchwarden that one of the weekly practices be 'tied' ie silent.

I suppose if you're very close to the church, a twice weekly 90 min session will be intrusive.

our church does a Wednesday practice session for about an hour 6-7pm which I understand is not only for the campanologists to keep up their skills but also to ensure the bells are kept in good order as part of an ongoing maintenance regime. They don't need to be rung that frequently, once a month is reasonable. We are on edge of village so it isn't intrusive and we enjoy sitting outside for dinner in the summer with the bells in the background.

could you contact the Parish Council and see what the regs are regarding permissible noise levels - it may be possible to negotiate a reduction in the 90 mins and the start and end times. If you're only on a Short term let, it may not be worth doing.

YABU, not because I enjoy church bells either, but perhaps you might have thought about it when you moved there - not sure they will stop just to suit you!

Try joining the ringers. You might find you enjoy it.

Church buildings with a full ring of bells, however, are certainly not "extremely common". It really is pretty easy to avoid living near the sound of bells if you don't want to.

Nowadays bellringing is more of a hobby than a religious practice; I suspect a very large proportion of ringers, possibly the majority, never go to church for other purposes. You can certainly ask whether people should be allowed to practise a hobby that involves making a noise, but is it "excess noise"? It's usually for a pretty short space of time, and many people like it. Contrast that with, say, living near a big football ground, or by a busy road, or near an open concert venue. Surely we can all live and let live when a noise really doesn't impinge on people's lives that much?

You need to talk to the vicar about whether they can get them turned off at night. There's usually a way to limit the mechanism between certain times.

You won't get 4-5 hours of ringing for every celebration in every church. A full peal last around 3-3.5 hours, and relatively few ringers actually want or are able to ring those as they take an awful lot of stamina and concentration. I guess you might get different groups of ringers coming to a church to ring so it seems like a lot in one day, but that will be pretty rare and will obviously mean fewer people ringing elsewhere.

I love, love hearing the bell ringing from the Minster not far from me.

Oh and church bells have no link to the community any more! Church attendance is at an all time low.

Our local church (congregation: sub 20 geriatrics, they've had no children there in years) has a group of elderly ringers who like to go and ring the bells, no one else is paying attention

I love people saying "why did you move near a church"

Church buildings are extremely common in the uk. In most villages there will be be one slap bang in the middle & the noise carries. The bells were intended to be heard!

The question is - does it continue, in an increasingly secular society, to be reasonable for churches serving only a tiny number of attendees, to make excess noise that would not be tolerated/permitted by other organisations on such a regular basis?

That’s easy solve so. All the best.

I love church bells.
I moved from a small town with a bell ringing church to a village with no church bells.
I really miss hearing them

That's something that happened to us once. We lived next door to a newspaper office and they printed there too, their windows were about a metre off our bedroom windows and it was a hot country so they were always open. The first few nights were terrible, friends likened the noise in daytime to standing on a tube station a the train came in. The only night they didn't print was Saturday and we quickly got used to the noise and slept through, however when it was a holiday on Monday so no printing on Sunday night the lack of noise woke us up. When our baby arrived she coped brilliantly too with the noise, thank goodness.

The village is mostly Methodist. That church is I believe still fairly well attended. They have no bells of course.

The Cof E one is dead on its feet. It's down to about 10 elderly regulars and a "messy church" attempt to pull in the young families. It isn't working.

Welcome!

This has made me crack up laughing. Thank you.

I know it's not for everyone, but I would be so sad if our church bells didn't ring every week. To me it's a sign of optimism and a vibrant community.

In a world where there are so many intrusive noises (you see it on MN all the time - next doors music, strimmer or hot tub, the traffic noise from the nearest motorway etc), the joyous sound that's been ringing out for a 1,000 years across our country seems something to embrace.

The good thing about churches is that whilst two or three times a week they make a noise they are silent neighbours most of the time. Between me and the church tower all my neighbours are sleeping peacefully underground.

I live 10 minutes walk away from the local cathedral. It has bells, frequently, and bell ringing practice. I've lived here for 15 years. The cathedrals been there for 1,000. Move somewhere else.

You're a joy.

I’m not a fan. The nearest church is over half a mile away but I can still hear the tuneless clanging.

Luckily it’s just once a month now as the services rotate between parishes.

90 minutes twice a week is hardly excessive. YABU.