Sung in playgrounds up and down the country for generations, the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons has provided the soundtrack to our collective childhood memories for centuries. Now composer Benjamin Till has returned to the ditty to create a community-based composition featuring the bells of all the east London churches referred to in the song.

With an instinct that a “longer version existed than the one we all knew” (which features just six churches), Benjamin began looking into the history of the rhyme last November. Sure enough, the 34-year-old discovered the first published version of Oranges and Lemons in the mid-18th Century anthology Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, and it mentioned a total of 17 churches. Remarkably, Benjamin found “bits of all the churches still existed, with the exception of Whitechapel which was destroyed in World War Two”, (although many believe this line refers to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry).

“It’s fascinating to see that some of these churches survived the Great Fire of London,” the Highgate-based composer tells me. “Some survived the Blitz, and some were even hit by IRA bombs in ‘80s and very nearly didn’t survive. The areas surrounding them, the City and the East End, have changed so much, and yet these churches haven’t moved for hundreds of years.”

Benjamin, whose previous work as composer/director includes Hampstead Heath: The Musical for BBC London and A1: The Road Musical for Channel 4, adds: “When you ring a bell that hasn’t been rung for 60 years, it feels grateful to be rung. You ring a bell and think, ‘My God, this bell rung for the coronation of Queen Victoria, when Waterloo was won, for Armistice day, and VE Day, if this bell could talk, what would it say’? When you consider the shape, it’s almost like they can catch memories, thoughts, ideas and emotions.”

Crawling into 17th Century belfrys was not without it’s problems, as Benjamin and his soundman Ivor Talbot soon discovered after securing a £4,990 grant for the project from the Arts Council.

“I think the most challenging was St Anne’s Lutheran Church where they do have a bell and they do still occasionally ring it, but to get to it we had to go up ladders that literally had been carved in the 19th Century,” the trained theatre director from Northamptonshire tells me. “At some point the treads broke and then the rope snapped on the bell half-way through, it really did feel a bit like the floorboards were missing. I remember thinking, ‘Please let my sound man live’.”

The 300 bells recorded for the piece form just one facet of Benjamin’s 12-minute composition, which will premiere live on BBC London on Friday, July 10, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Big Ben (which was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry) chiming for the first time. The second thread incorporates two choirs singing the famous rhyme; one made up of people who either work or live within “earshot of the bells”, and the other featuring pupils from Virginia School, whose voices will “weave magically in and out of the sound of the bells”.

“The third aspect,” Benjamin explains, “is the spoken word. We have spoken to people from the Jewish East End, first wave Bengali immigrants, the chap who rings the Lutine Bell in Lloyds, and people with memories of IRA bombs. We had a lovely interview with the playwright Arnold Westka who remembers a man playing songs from a gramophone strapped to his pram for a penny. It all gives you an idea of how simple life was.”

He continues: “Another women talked about all the children running to Shoreditch Church when the bells rung because they knew there would be a wedding and they could look at the pretty dress and flowers. All these memories are wrapped up in the bells.”

Oranges and Lemons will premiere on BBC London on Friday, July 10. A live performance is also planned for the same day at St Mary le Bow (details tbc). For more information please visit www.benjamintill.com