Until Royal Academician John Maine was engaged to add an artistic element to the new £30million flood defences and seafront enhancements at Weston-super-Mare, natural stone was only a vague idea in the equation. The lead engineers, Royal Haskoning, had worked with John before and knew his flair with natural materials would enhance the scheme. John introduced the five different kinds of Chinese granite used on the project for paving, seating and the 8m high feature archway, the local Blue Lias and Mendip limestones for walls and seats and the Classach sandstone from Scotland that forms the copings to the walls. There is also some Portland roach limestone either side of flood gates in the walls to add impact and help the visually impaired. Weston-super-Mare specialist contractors EJ McGrath Construction, working for principal contractors Birse Civils, carried out the stonework and John Maine says he cannot praise them highly enough for the quality of their work. 

The arguments for revitalising the seafront at Weston-super-Mare on the west coast of Somerset were twofold. Primarily, the flood defences needed improving. But so did the town’s economy as a seaside resort. And the first major investment in the area since the Victorians created the resort 130 years ago provided the opportunity to satisfy both requirements. 

The project will be officially opened ahead of the tourist season next year, but for local firm EJ McGrath Construction Ltd, who have spent two-and-a-half years laying the granite paving and building the stone walls and seats, the work is now finished.

It was by far the largest project Eamonn McGrath had worked on since he left his job with a now defunct stonemasonry company in Nottingham 15 years ago to join his girlfriend in the southern seaside town where he established his own business. Eamonn and his son Liam started the project with five teams of one-plus-one, but as it came to an end they employed 50 people, had moved to new premises with more parking and storage room, and had started a second major paving project, this time in Cardiff, again with the main contractors at Weston-super-Mare, Birse Civils Ltd, and were working on another at Kingswood in Bristol.

Eamonn says: “It’s been a lovely project but a bit of a headache getting good blokes. I started with teams of very good lads, but bringing others up to their standards is hard work.”

It was quite a leap of faith for Birse to sub-contract the work to McGraths. There were 14,000m² of paving to be laid in the project, but the first contract they awarded to McGraths was for 1,000m². Eamonn says: “I said to Chris Hill, their project manager, ‘You’re testing me.’ He smiled and said, ‘Yes’. But I was always confident we would get the rest.” 

The confidence came from understanding stone and how it should be laid – and from knowing he could ensure it would be laid properly even though he had to take on more people for the project because he would not tolerate sloppy work. The results pictured here speak for themselves.

The paving is all in Chinese granites but there are various other stones in the project. They include 1,200m2 of Blue Lias from Somerton on the wall on the seaward side of the promenade that runs 1.2km along the seafront either side of the pier. There is also a mixture of reclaimed Mendip carboniferous limestone that the council had stockpiled for the project and some new stone from Shipton Quarry near Cheddar for the wall on the road side of the promenade. The copings in both cases are in Classach from Scotland. There is even some Portland limestone Roach supporting the decorative flood gates.

Because the project was essentially flood protection, £27.5million of the £30million budget was met by Defra. The flood defences were designed by consulting engineers Royal Haskoning. Their vision was to create a flood defence scheme that provided much needed protection without it looking like flood defences.

The basic structure of the defences involved a fair amount of concrete. However, John Maine, a Royal Academician known for his work in natural materials, was commissioned to make sure aesthetics played a key part in the project and he introduced a variety of uses of stone, bringing an overall visual coherence to the scheme. 

The greatest expense was the engineering work to tackle the flood defences, so the use of stone for paving and walling made little difference to the overall budget. However, it would make a significant contribution to the other stated aim of the project to regenerate tourism, thus creating economic prosperity and improving the appearance of the town for residents, visitors and investors.

John Maine is a sculptor, not a mason, but he worked on Portland for 20 years and learnt a lot from the masons there. He had made a stone arch in Australia and he designed another as a focal point to the promenade at Weston-super-Mare. A smaller version of it formed part of his contribution to the Royal Academy Summer Show this year along with a 2.5m high column of pink Indian granite. He is currently designing the stonework for Green Park underground station in London. “I do take on this sort of work,” he told NSS. “It’s an environmental piece, if you like.”

He made features such as flood gates in the walls and a culvert exit cover beautiful rather than simply utilitarian. He even introduced an artistic element into the plain paving by using the different granites with a mixture of fine picked and flamed finishes in various sizes all laid on the diagonal. 

Because of the variety of the stone used, McGraths needed 25 pallets of granite that they had to sort into the required finishes, shapes and sizes to produce 10m² of paving. They had teams just sorting the stone for those who were laying it.

John Maine also designed 35 benches, many set into the wall on the road side of the promenade. Some are unfinished Portland Blue limestone or created from blocks straight from Shipton Quarry near Cheddar; some, in contrast, are polished granite. All the stone was supplied by stone wholesalers Pisani’s Scottish company, Fyfe Glenrock.

Rachel Lewis, project manager for North Somerset Council, told NSS the council is delighted with both the concept and the execution of the seafront enhancements. She says the flood defences will protect the 4,500 seafront properties in the town and make investment in them more feasible, while the attractive new 11/2mile long seafront promenade around the pier will help rejuvenate the town’s reputation as a seaside resort. 

FROM EXPERIENCE: A hired telehandler delivering pallets of stone during the project left a trail of hydraulic oil on the newly laid granite paving. The spill took place around midday one day and by 8am the following day a biological hydrocarbon digestant called PDM-7 HC supplied by Ross Environmental Products in Kidderminster was being applied to a test area of the spilled oil. Ross said the product would ‘digest’ the oil without damaging the stone and without leaving toxic by-products so the paving could be safely washed down with water after application. Several applications over a period of three days completely removed all signs of the oil.