Charlotte Shacklock met up with sales director Ant Collins of the Hardscape Group at the Public Space Expo where the company had created its very own village.

CS: Can you tell us how Hardscape Village came about?  

AC: The starting point is probably our 30th birthday which we are celebrating this year. We started out in 1994 and we became employee-owned around two years ago. We started exploring our profile and wanted to demonstrate ourselves as one of the bigger players in commercial spaces. We sit in quite a niche position and work with quarries and manufacturing partners to bring those materials through the design process into the built environment which not many can offer in our market. Through some research it was clear everyone who knew us in the industry were impressed by what we offered, but some people outside the industry either hadn’t heard of us or maybe thought we focused on small commercial and domestic garden projects.  

For many years we have operated right across all commercial spaces – public municipalities, city centres – it’s the core of what we do.  We spotted the opportunity to raise our profile at the Public Space Expo as we know the wider Futurescape event to be a good industry mixer and networking event, we’ve never exhibited here, but when they announced it would include the Public Space Expo, we were certainly interested. We were looking for key events to mark the anniversary and this seemed perfect for us to be the headline sponsor. The idea of creating our own village at the show evolved over time. How does the village differ from having a stand at the show? It’s hard for us to show things in a small space because there’s so much – even one or two stands doesn’t do it justice. I thought it would be nice to remove the mystique of who we deal with and allow the design community, clients – even our competition, to come and speak to our suppliers because we feel that strongly about the relationship we have with them. If you’re interested in Italian porphyry, for example – you can speak directly to the stakeholders of the quarry and factory who are part of the Hardscape Village. 

You don’t need a Hardscape representative there to listen to the conversation or hand out a business card or scan your lanyard. We’re experts through experience, they’re experts because the live and breathe those materials. We have manufacturers and quarry owners from Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK here. So again, from that angle, there’s materials there that a lot of the market don’t know exist. There’s a material from eastern Scotland called Angus sandstone. Not many commercially seem to know what that product is and what it can do. But we have got samples here and the company has been proud as punch to be a part of it. That kind of reciprocal relationship is really helpful for us. People buy from people after all. 

How important is it to be ethical and sustainable? 
For over a decade we have been leaders in ethical trading and had every accreditation that you could wish for, to be able to explain that you can work directly with local authority in their procurement routes. Still, it took a pandemic to then shake our market to say we had already had these supply chain relationships but they were much lower volume than they are now. We are supported by the Stone Federation of Great Britain and the Landscape Institute and have a duty of care for where we source materials and are very selective. Cost is still crucial to a project, but it’s now not always number one priority. As an example speed is key now because the markets are busy. Lead time is an issue across the board. Carbon is a bigger agenda. More clients are saying “we don’t mind so much if it costs a bit more, as long as we can lessen our carbon footprint” and we can do carbon analysis of specifications. We can say to the client, spec A, which is European granite, as an example, based on quantities and where they’re from, will spit out X carbon. And we can compare materials along with relatable costs.  

The Hardscape Village was an opportunity to show the best of the industry, which we definitely achieved. And again, having some of the supply chains that aren’t physically here coming to visit just to say hello and thanks for showing the material, it’s fantastic for us because it’s a wide chain of people who support our business.  A lot of the quarries traditionally, certainly in Europe, they’re owned by families. I’ve known some of these families for 20 years. I’ve seen their children grow up and they’ve seen mine grow up – it really is personal.