Since Ian Butterworth set up Wessex Dimensional Stone he has trebled productivity of Chilmark and Elm Park mines. But he has also discovered some strange attitudes towards his naturally environmentally friendly products

Since then the company he established, Wessex Dimensional Stone, has also taken over production of Bath Stone from the Elm Park mine that gave Ian his introduction to the stone industry in the first place. He was Tarmac’s South Division Engineering Manager before Tarmac were taken over by Anglo American in 2000. Afterwards he worked as an engineering consultant and one of his consultancies was Elm Park.

When he took over production at Elm Park at the end of 2005 he said he would be increasing the output. He told NSS at the time: “All I know is that every block that was ever extracted from Elm Park was immediately sold and people were frustrated that they couldn’t get the block when they wanted it.”

He had felt the same frustration about Chilmark – that its potential was being hampered simply because not enough of it was being extracted to meet demand.

Investment has helped correct that and Wessex are now producing stone three times faster at Chilmark than when they took over the business. Ian says the level of growth has been so great that even in these difficult times he does not expect sales to fall, but simply for the growth be curtailed for a year or so. “If the sales graph goes flat now, I’m having a recession,” he says.

One thing he says is happening is that people who have been given a price are coming back to ask for a discount. “I have said we don’t actually need to do that and I’m hoping we can hold on to that position. If someone in the industry folds on that position and we all start undercutting each other, we can follow each other into the abyss.”

His aim from the outset was to get Chilmark recognised again as one of the great limestones of the British Isles, up there with Portland and Bath. He says it was Wren’s favourite stone and might have been used by the architect for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666 if it had been easier to transport it to London. As it was, Portland’s coastal quarries had the advantage.

Christopher Wren was certainly familiar with Chilmark stone. He lived in a house built of it four miles away in the village of East Knoyle.

Another great name, George Gilbert Scott, was also familiar with it and used it on Westminster Abbey while he was Surveyor of the Fabric there from 1849 to ’78. He favoured a particular bed known as the trough bed, which contains more figuring from a higher concentration of shell fossils than the other beds of Chilmark.

The trough bed, which is about 1m thick, currently forms the roof of the mine, but the area being worked is 25m below ground and has plenty of stone to act as a roof above it.

Following geological surveys, the trough bed is once again being extracted and the chambers in the mines are now larger than they used to be so that more stone is recovered and less left as pillars, although, of course, the pillars still perform to many times the safety level.

For Scott, getting Chilmark stone into London was easier than it had been for Wren because, with the completion of the Kennet & Avon Canal in 1820 and the Great Western Railway in 1841, communication routes with London were improved. The stone has been used on Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle and Ian Butterworth would like more of it to go to London, both for restoration work and new build.

So why has the stone industry not turned out to be quite what Ian had expected? Largely because it does not receive the level of support he had expected from specifiers, developers, planners and politicians.

His early contacts with the stone industry had made him aware that its customers were frustrated by the difficulty of getting the quantities of British stone they wanted in the timescales they wanted, which he attributed to supply inefficiencies.

But now he says: “We are not treated as well as we should be treated. We deserve much better support. Margins are tight and without support, quarries and stone types will continue to disappear.”

He is still smarting from a decision to allow reconstituted stone to be used at higher levels in the £360million SouthGate retail-led development in Bath, a World Heritage Site with its Roman history and outstanding Georgian Bath stone architecture.

“You still have to try to digest why recon has been used at high level,” says Ian. “Why? The rest of Bath is in natural stone. And why was the Bath stone that has been used sent over to Italy to be sawn? Why? When there are plenty of masons and cutting yards here in Bath and the UK?”

He has other examples of strange decisions that have gone against the local industry. He quotes an example where architects and planners were looking for a Bath stone to match an existing church opposite a new court that was proposed (and has yet to be built). There was much discussion and producing of sample panels. “Then they just walked away and decided to use Jura,” says Ian. “I don’t think there was anything between the prices – and that was before the collapse of sterling – but they just decided to make the building look completely different. Too often a foreign stone is specified for no other reason than an architect’s or planner’s preference.

“The councillors in this city spent about 1,000 hours developing a sustainable development policy that says, where possible, local materials should be used. Then they simply ignore it.”

Again, this time in Tisbury, a town that has used Chilmark stone for hundreds of years along with red brick, a new town centre housing development was allowed to go ahead using a reconstituted product that Ian complains looks nothing like the real stone.

“People get so concerned about natural stone matching, but with recon it suddenly doesn’t matter. When the builders needed natural stone for a boundary wall they commented how similar the price was to the recon.”

For eight houses being built on the edge of Tisbury, meanwhile, the planners inconsistently insisted on Chilmark natural stone being used.

Given the energy involved in the production of cement used in reconstituted products, Ian argues that there would be environmental benefits from using greater quantities of natural stone. And if he could crop more of his smaller pieces of stone for walling he reckons his waste factor could be reduced from 30% to 10%.

Not that he accepts the term ‘waste’. He says: “It’s not waste, it’s dormant product. It’s still in the mine. Someone will come along and use it one day.”

And if anyone doubts the benefit to builders of using natural stone Ian has a very clear example. In Motcombe, a village near Shaftesbury, 25% of the houses in a new development used walling in Wessex Dimensional Stone’s Hurdcott Green Sandstone. “They were sold before they were finished and for a higher price,” says Ian. “The others were still being sold a year later. A housebuilder told me that for the 3-6% extra stone costs him in materials he could put 10-15% extra on the price.”

Hurdcott was one of the stones used on the New Build (load bearing stone) Award winner in last year’s Natural Stone Awards presented at Lords cricket ground as well as on a Commended Palladian bridge in the Repair & Restoration category.

While the Chilmark and Hurdcott stones are enjoying their own successes, it is the Elm Park Bath Stone that provides the largest share of Wessex Dimensional Stone’s sales. They have a 25-year renewable lease on the mine and have just secured planning permission to work another 15acres. At the current rate of extraction the known reserves will last until the end of this millennium.

They have shown the stone at the Natural Stone Show at ExCeL London and written to architects to let them know it is available. The biggest selling point is that production from the mine has increased and is consistent and the stone can now be supplied within five days.

Although Elm Park Bath Stone has been used for many years, its production was always limited because it is hard, making it difficult to extract when it had to be sawn by hand. With today’s machinery that is no longer a problem and its acknowledged durability is now one of its main selling points.

It is currently being supplied for restoration projects at Hampton Court in London and St Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol. And both Elm Park and Chilmark are being supplied for on-going repairs and restoration to Shureland Hall, on Sheppey, Kent, as a replacement for Kentish Ragstone.