HistoricSiteMarkers
Postwar & Contemporary

Bell of Hope

New York, New York County, New York

Marker Inscription

In 2002 on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the Bell of Hope was presented to the people of New York by the Lord Mayor of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was created by England’s renowned Whitechapel Foundry, which also cast the Litranscription continues on the marker

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The Story

In the raw first year after September 11, 2001, London answered lower Manhattan's grief with a gift cast in bronze. On the 2002 anniversary of the attacks, the Lord Mayor of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury presented this Bell of Hope to New York, a token of the old bond between two English-speaking nations sharpened by shared loss. It came from London's Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the same centuries-old workshop whose bells rang out from Big Ben and, generations earlier, the Liberty Bell. Rung each year near Ground Zero, the bell turns a moment of mourning into an act of remembrance and resolve.

Why it matters

The bell marks how the September 11 attacks reshaped New York and drew the wider world into America's grief, standing as a permanent symbol of international solidarity at the nation's most visited site of modern remembrance.

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Related people

  • · Lord Mayor of London
  • · Archbishop of Canterbury

Related events

  • · September 11, 2001 attacks

Themes & tags

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