Realstone are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year and to mark the occasion invited some of their customers and clients along to an open day in June. There was also another open day for local residents and a fun day for the 70+ people employed by the group.

As well as touring Realstone\'s works at Wingerworth in Derbyshire, customers and clients also visited Peak Moor Quarry, one of the 10 quarries operated by sister company Block Stone, and the tile line of Dimensional English Stone near Matlock bought from Stonell last year.

Jill Gregory of Block Stone, who now spends most of her time in America where sales of the English stones are increasing steadily, was in the UK following the group\'s exhibit at Stone+tec, the major German stone show in Nuremberg, where there was a lot of interest in the UK stones and tiles.

Block Stone have three teams operating the quarries in the UK, one based permanently at Peak Moor Quarry, which supplies their most popular stone. The visitors saw a block of about 100 tonnes being pushed from the face of the quarry by an excavator and then saw how blocks are drilled and, using explosives, broken down into blocks of about 15 tonnes each for transportation.

At the Dimensional English Stone tile factory the visitors heard that about 110m2 of tiles are being produced daily and that a second line is planned. The tiles have already proved popular with tile shops and conservatory companies and Sarah Johnson, newly appointed to sell the tiles, says the response from customers has been extremely good.