There is a new Jordan’s Whitbed Portland limestone bench on the Thames riverside walk near London Bridge thanks to a competition instigated by Chichester masonry company CWO, Portland limestone extractors Albion Stone, the Masons’ livery company and the City of London Corporation.

The bench was unveiled by Lord Mayor Alderman Nick Anstee this month (December).

The competition was open to architectural students and is designed to give them an introduction to and better understanding of stone.

The winning design was produced by four masonry apprentices with CWO and three from Weymouth and York Colleges who are sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Masons. They worked with the winning architectural student, who visited the workshops once a fortnight to review the work.

From 130 initial expressions of interest in the competition, 19 were shortlisted and whittled down to four finalists, who visited the quarries on Portland to see where the stone came from and the workshops of CWO to see how stone is worked.

The four then made a presentation to the judges at the Guildhall in London in September for the final decision to be made.

The judges said that after the presentations there was a clear winner in Priscilla Fernandes, a sixth year student at London Metropolitan University. They said she demonstrated a particular understanding of how her design would fit into the landscape, both respecting it and contributing to it.

She explained to NSS at the unveiling that the curves of the bench reflect the river while the flowers carved into it can all be seen in the areas around the bench that have been planted to reinvigorate the Thames pathway. The flowers are faithful reproductions of her drawings transferred from CAD to template paper by Neale Watts, one of the apprentices who is training to be a draughtsman.

As well as being decorative, the structure had to be robust enough to survive in the public realm and take into account the circulation of people on the footpath.

“I’m interested in furniture design,” she said, “and wanted to have a go at external furniture in the public realm.”

The design she originally submitted used three pieces of stone but was developed to incorporate seven sections by the end.

One of the criteria was that all the stone had to come from one block of Portland stone.

She said the process of making the bench had been “really informative”. She said: “Stone isn’t one of those materials you learn about.”

The visit to Portland was the first time she had seen a quarry. “I didn’t realise it was going to be that massive.”

She praised the first and second year masonry apprentices for their work. “They added their own personality and input their own ideas, which was really great,” she says. It was their suggestion to add different finishes on the flowers, for example. One of the apprentices had only joined CWO eight weeks before he started working on the bench.

The apprentices not only made the bench at CWO’s workshops but also installed it on-site.

A stone in front of the bench is hand lettered with an inscription that commemorates the unveiling by the Lord Mayor and records Priscilla’s success in the competition.