Stone federation Great Britain’s Quarry Forum gives its opinion on issues relating to the stone industry from the point of view of companies that extract dimensional stone from opencast and underground quarries and mines.

When you are popping open bottles of Champagne in the coming holiday season you might like to reflect that stones could soon be enjoying the same protection of their geographical origins as that particular sparkling wine does.

The Stone Federation Quarry Forum is delighted to see that the campaign to extend Geographical Indications (GI) protection to products other than foods (and including natural stone) is continuing to gather momentum.

This significant piece of European legislation would prevent geographical names such as Portland, an island in Dorset that already lends its name to a particular limestone, or Carrara in Italy from being applied to man-made products or imports.

Such protection is currently afforded to a range of food and drink products, including Champagne, Parma ham and Melton Mowbray pork pies.

The extension of GI to non-food and drink products is particularly encouraging in the light of the subject covered in this column last month, when we discussed the issues of correct stone naming within the industry under the requirements of BSEN 12440.

A year ago, Stone Federation rallied its members to the cause of GI, encouraging them to add their support to the proposal to expand it to stone and explaining the significance it held.

Great Britain is home to some of the world’s best-known stones of provenance and as a forum representing indigenous quarrying firms, the Stone Federation Quarry Group is passionate about seeing this legislation come to pass.

As well as Portland, stones that could benefit from such legislation might include Cotswold limestone, York Stone, Bath Stone and Ancaster.

In this vein, it was encouraging for the Quarry Forum to see that 85% of projects honoured in the 2014 Natural Stone Awards incorporated British stone. This shows that architects, clients and specifiers are taking note of the impact that importing stones from overseas has on the carbon footprint of a project.

Furthermore, many of the projects entered in the Awards saw a ‘local stone for local projects’ approach, which, again, is an encouraging trend.

Part of the aim moving forwards is to continue to promote the benefits of using Britain’s ‘home-grown’ stone. The Stone Federation ‘Stone in the City’ events in Leeds and London in November were examples of how the Federation can spread that message to the architectural and design community.

In London, the event saw architects presented with a project profile on the Bomber Command Memorial, which was the New Build Traditional Style Stonemasonry winner in the 2014 Natural Stone Awards. It is an exquisite example of classical detailing in Portland stone by architect Liam O’Connor and masons S McConnell & Sons in Northern Ireland.

This method of illustrating British Stone success stories is a particularly effective way of encouraging architects to look to British Stone as their ‘go to’ material in the future.

Our strength of feeling about the issues surrounding the correct naming of stone are both because of the requirements the law makes of our industry and a desire to help the architect, designer or client have confidence that what they think they are buying is, in fact, what they are getting.

Jane Buxey, Stone Federation’s Chief Executive, puts it this way: “This legislation is very significant for the natural stone industry as it would help to deal with the issue of man-made or imported stones misleading architects and specifiers through incorrectly labelling their materials. Britain is home to some world renowned natural stones with a fantastic local heritage and we support anything that would seek to protect this provenance.”