The Chinese grey granite G603 has had a major impact on urban landscaping, being incorporated into projects throughout the British Isles. But there are alternatives and as planners and designers become increasingly sustainability-conscious they are keen to look for them in British quarries. The new timeline at the British Geological Survey can help them do that. To download a PDF of graphs providing a snapshot of stone imports for hard landscaping, click here.

Designers and clients looking for low carbon footprint British products for their hard landscaping projects are this month (May) being given an impressive new resource to help them find what they are looking for.

It is at the headquarters of the British Geological Survey (BGS) at Keyworth, near Nottingham. The BGS site has been redeveloped and part of that work has been to include the geological timeline pathway constructed from the stones of the British Isles. It is supremely relevant to the Geological Survey but it could not have happened without the co-operation and generosity of the UK quarry companies supplying hard landscaping.

Concrete paving was being considered, but geologists at the BGS and the enthusiasm of some in the stone industry won the day.

The timeline has been created by the BGS in conjunction with stone hard landscaping specialist CED, which has depots around the country and is headquartered in Grays, Essex. Between them, the BGS and CED have gone to great lengths to ensure that the timeline really does represent the rocks of the British Isles, spanning more than 3,000million years.

The 1,200m2 timeline includes the oldest to the youngest rocks of the United Kingdom, beginning 3billion years ago at the Pre-Cambrian with Lewisian Gneiss. It continues through the Cambrian (Welsh slate), the Ordovician and Silurian (Cumbrian slates), the Devonian (Cornish slate and Caithness flagstone), the Carboniferous (York stone and Pennant sandstones), Permian and Triassic (sandstones from Dumfriesshire and Morayshire), the Jurassic and Cretaceous (respectively Blue Lias and Purbeck limestones), and the most recent rocks from the Cenozoic or Tertiary (Mourne granite from Northern Ireland).

There are no rocks suitable for sawing from the latest and current Quaternary Period, but it gets a nod by the inclusion of pebbles from an older period worn smooth and deposited by glaciers during the Quarternary. Other stones have been included in various forms – there is a Portland limestone bench, Cornish and Scottish granite, knapped flint and ironstone.

Kier Marriott entered into the spirit of achieving something exceptional on this design & build contract, as did architects Frank Shaw Associates, who produced the detailed setting out arrangements.

And visiting designers might like to take note of the way the stones have been used. Most of the paving has been laid in courses with stones of random lengths, reducing waste and cost by making the most efficient use of the raw material. The widths and thicknesses used have had the same consideration, as well as being produced to make laying more economical.

All concerned are to be congratulated on providing a comprehensive overview of the geology of the British Isles in an impressive example of what British stone can contribute to hard landscaping projects. Anyone involved in hard landscaping who does not visit Keyworth to take a look at the timeline is missing a trick.

And it could hardly have come at a more opportune time, as landscape architects and town planners all over the country do seem to be more open to moving beyond Chinese granite and Indian sandstone for their projects.

The snapshot of hard landscaping imports provided by the figures from HM Revenue & Customs on page 21 gives an indication of the continuing popularity of natural stone in hard landscaping, albeit with India and China continuing to dominate. The figures are in value, but the volumes tell the same story, although favouring China more because the price of products coming from China has not risen as fast as imports from India and Europe and even fell considerably last year.

There are no figures available to provide a similar snapshot of the use of indigenous stone but the British quarries generally report a satisfactory level of activity.

Forest Pennant in the Forest of Dean has been having a particularly successful time. Sales of the stone as paving have rocketed since the quarry and stone processing firm started collaborating with the Hart family to supply Royal Forest Pennant paving. Now the stone company has also reached an agreement to supply its paving to Charcon, the hard landscaping arm of Aggregate Industries, which decided to go head-to-head with Marshalls last year by bringing Whitworth York stone on to the market.

Now Charcon is adding the subtle, multi-coloured Forest Pennant, including the range of tactile paving that Forest Pennant produces in its well-equipped factory.

Forest Pennant MD Nick Horton says Charcon, with its sales force of 36, will introduce the stone to major contractors such as Galliford Try and Carillion, who would like all of their projects to be BREEAM rated. Nick believes that having gained a PAS 2050 carbon footprint for his paving will help (for more about that and how you can work out your own carbon footprint using the Forest Pennant formula, see Business to Busienss : Forest Pennant and the spreadsheet on the home page of this website).

Selling to the major contractors could increase Forest Pennant’s geographical coverage, because although the stone has been used further afield, it is more commonly used in the West Country and Wales. “I can only see it as additional business, not substitution,” says Nick.

Another company keeping busy is DeLank in Cornwall. The only English competitor to Chinese granite, the DeLank quarry was taken over by Adrian Phillips of Black Mountain Quarries in Pontrilas, Herefordshire, last year.

Traditionally preferred in its black & white look, DeLank granite also comes out of the ground in a reddish-brown that is beginning to find favour again. In earlier times, when winning the granite was even harder work, there was less inclination to throw any of the block away, so it was used whether it was red or grey. Now the mixture is once again in favour, both for conservation work on historic sites and on new work to resemble the traditional use of the stone.

It is a mixture of the colours that are currently being used in St Austell, Cornwall, to pedestrianise a shopping area. As well as producing a traditional look, leaving the red in the granite produces a greater yield of paving from the block and, therefore, a more economical product with a lower carbon footprint.

More yield per block has also been achieved by using three widths and random lengths. On paving areas, the stone is 50mm thick while on areas that will have to carry traffic such as refuse trucks and emergency vehicles it is 75mm thick.

A nice (if expensive) touch is that the names of all the side streets have been cut into the granite in letters 250mm high – and the names are up to 30 characters long. All the letters have been ‘V’ cut by hand by DeLank’s masons then painted in a special epoxy sapphire blue paint that costs £90 for 2.5litres.

In an unusual piece of forward thinking, a network of tubular ducting has been laid beneath the granite so that services can be added and extended without having to dig up the road again.

The project is just coming to an end but has helped keep the saws at DeLank busy for the past eight months.

When Adrian Phillips took over DeLank he could see the quarry’s impressive saws were under utilised and immediately set about keeping them busy by getting them processing other stones as well as the granite. One of the other stones they have been processing lately is Pennant from Neath in South Wales to produce sawn setts with a flamed surface for Oxford Street in Swansea. The stone was used in 100mm widths, 125, 150 and 175mm lengths and a heavily engineered 180mm thick.

Some more of DeLank’s work in its own granite will be unveiled this month at the Eden Project in Cornwall, where a 70tonne piece of the Cornish granite worked into a sculpture called ‘Seed’ by Peter Randall-Page is already proudly displayed. The latest creation is by Thomas Hoblyn. It is called the ‘Sense of Memory’ garden and was first shown at Chelsea Flower Show. In the breakdown of the show, pieces of the garden were damaged but DeLank have re-fashioned it for the Eden Project.

In the garden, the 100mm thick granite has a dolly punched finish with rubbed rivulets running down it, standing out blue against the dolly-punching when water is running down the granite. “It took hundreds of man-hours doing that,” says DeLank Quarry Manager Ian Skinner.

He admits he had expected more of the projects he has been involved with to have been put on hold as a result of the economic difficulties but feels both councils and individuals have bitten the bullet and gone ahead.

With Cornwall being reliant on the tourist trade, most public realm works usually take place off-season, so Ian has not been surprised to have been kept busy over winter, but he says he is still receiving a lot of enquiries now from individuals who want to enhance their properties with high specification porticos that seem to have become fashionable among wealthier residents and add a lot of value to the stone coming out of the quarry.

The biggest of the hard landscaping product suppliers is Marshalls, although it, of course, sells a wide range of products, not just natural stone. One of the projects it did supply with natural stone last year was the truly impressive Exhibition Road project in London (featured on the right) that is already picking up awards.

Marshalls continues to be committed to the sustainability agenda that it has led, particularly ethical sourcing, although Ian Macdougal, the Minerals Products Managing Director at Marshalls and chair of the Minerals Products Association Dimension Stone Group, says it can be difficult to appreciate its value in the current economic environment. “We keep asking ourselves how high up the agenda it is.”

Supplying materials to the Olympic village, including 14,000m2 of York stone paving, last year produced £10million worth of sales, which was at the upper end of the company’s expectations. As a result of that and an expected decrease in spending by London boroughs this year, sales of York stone were budgeted to fall 25%. But Ian says it is not looking as severe as that and some projects expected to have been put on hold are going ahead.

Marshalls has experienced some difficult years since the recession hit, although its annual report published last month shows sales last year rose 8% to £334million and pre-tax profit was up about £3million to £13.7million. But the 130-page report holds out little hope of much improvement in the markets in general this year.