The Blagdon sandstone above the coal reserves at Banks Mining’s operation in Northumberland was just waste until Anthony McAdam saw it and Block Stone added it to the range of dimensional stones it supplies. Now it has gone to the Olympics.

Most of the hundreds of thousands of people visiting the Olympics this month will not realise it, but they will be among the first to look upon the new Blagdon Buff sandstone from the Realstone Group. The Olympics are one of the first specifications of the stone outside of the North East, where it is quarried. It could hardly have had a higher profile introduction!

The stone was processed by Cavendish Masonry for the information centre that is part of the BP-sponsored ‘Walk in the Park’. The Walk enables visitors to see the Olympic Park from the perspective of the meadows that surround the new buildings and to explore the history of the site and its redevelopment.

The stone is used for the walls and floor of the tunnel-like information centre. For the walls it was manufactured offsite into steel frames to speed-up construction onsite. The panels use cod-ends (the normally discarded rough end pieces left when blocks are sawn) to give the feature the sense of a tunnel cut through stone. The Blagdon stone also comprises 50m2 of interior paving.

Blagdon is the first of three stones that Realstone’s quarry company, Block Stone, is introducing thanks to Banks Mining, the open-cast coal mining company.

There is a magnitude of difference between the size of open-cast coal mining and dimensional stone extraction. But the two are working in harmony on the Blagdon Estate in Northumberland. Another Banks site in the North East and one in Scotland will soon be coming on stream for Block Stone as well.

For the coal mining on the Blagdon Estate, Banks has a continuous stream of dump-trucks carrying away 200tonnes of overburden per trip. They are filled by some of the largest face shovels in the country scooping up 50tonnes of material at a time.

Part of the overburden that Banks has to remove to reach the coal seams is a particularly fine building sandstone – the same stone that was used in the 18th century to build Blagdon Hall, the mansion at the heart of the Blagdon Estate, as well as other buildings on the estate and in the surrounding area.

The overburden was being used in the creation of the Charles Jencks landscape artwork called Northumberlandia, a 34m high, 400m long depiction of a female, although most of it was simply being discarded by Banks as part of the backfill of the coal mining operation. That is until Anthony McAdam, who lives nearby, saw it.

Anthony has been in the dimensional stone industry all his life and recognised the potential of the top quality sandstone he saw, some blocks weighing as much as 50tonnes and more than 10m long.

He approached Banks with a proposal to recover some of it. Banks does recover coincidental minerals such as fireclay from its sites but the coal miner was not initially enthusiastic about Anthony’s proposal.

“It took an awful lot of getting in there,” Anthony told NSS. “These guys are used to talking multi-million pound deals and I wanted a few blocks of stone, albeit very valuable stone. It was Anthony and Goliath. They’re moving 1,000tonnes before the morning tea break.”

Nevertheless, he persisted and eventually his request to recover some of the blocks moved up the Banks hierarchy until it arrived at director level, where it received a more sympathetic hearing. Banks was persuaded of the value of recovering the stone and Anthony signed an agreement with the company.

He then approached the Realstone Group, which is always on the look-out for new sources of stone, and in November last year he joined Block Stone as Northern Quarries Development Manager with a brief to source more dimensional stone quarries in the North and Scotland, working with Tina Bailey, the Block Stone Office & Sales Manager. Anthony also represents the Realstone processing operation as Northern Sales Manager.

The reserves of Blagdon stone are huge. If this were the only sandstone quarry in the country it could probably satisfy the whole of the UK’s demand for the indigenous material and still have surpluses. It will be active for 10-12 years, during which time enough of the stone will be stockpiled to keep it available for a similar length of time again.

That level of production enables Block Stone to be as selective as it likes about the blocks it chooses and almost no block taken from the site so far has been rejected, neither by Realstone, if it has gone into the Group’s own factory, nor by any other processor who has bought it.

The Blagdon stone has joined the stone from the eight other quarries in the UK that Block Stone operates.

Producing block has required a small change in working practice and a bigger change in attitude by Banks Mining, which would normally want to break waste into the smallest size possible for ease of removal. But the royalties being paid by Block Stone has made the dimensional stone a viable by-product. As Iain Kennedy, the Managing Director of the Realstone Group, says: “It’s a tremendous use of what would otherwise be waste.”

Like many British stones, Blagdon sandstone has a local market because it has been used in the Newcastle area historically, making it a useful resource for restoration projects. One of its first uses was as a new floor for St Nicholas’ Church in Cramlington, a village near the coal mine.

It is also ideal for extensions and alterations to match existing buildings and is already finding a market in new build, especially as walling in sensitive areas and where the owners like to use the singularly appropriate local materials for their new homes.

But it is not only in the North East that Blagdon stone is finding a ready market, as the Olympic contract has shown. It has different shades to Block Stone’s popular Peakmoor Millstone Grit from Derbyshire, complementing it perfectly in the company’s range and broadening the choice available to architects and landscapers.

Blagdon stone is also going north into Scotland and south to the Sussex coast as a match for Sussex sandstone.

The association with Banks is an exciting development for Block Stone but, says Iain Kennedy, is just the first of many moves the Realstone Group has planned to position itself in readiness for better times ahead.