New York resident Christine Cole of Precision Stone Inc professes her love for the architecture of the Big Apple.

One of the most special aspects of living in New York City is the constant sense of awe I feel every day. The city’s energy, its people, and the environment all contribute to this feeling, a wonder that has been shared by millions before me. If I’m not going to romanticise my life, who will? One of the most powerful sources of this wonder is the city’s built environment, particularly its towering stone buildings. These architectural masterpieces, crafted from materials like marble, limestone, and granite, connect us to the past and to the people who lived in different eras. They offer a humbling perspective on time, grounding us in the present while fueling a constant curiosity about history and the reasons behind the way things are. This fascination is why I frequently seek out Manhattan’s stone buildings, each a monument to history and craftsmanship. These buildings have become special to me: the New York Public Library, The Ansonia, 220 Central Park South, 1 Wall Street and the Municipal Building. They represent the city’s architectural legacy, blending historical significance with lasting impact.

First, let me begin with the building I’m lucky enough to call my neighbourhood library. The city’s main branch, officially known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, is a grand example of Beaux-Arts design. Completed in 1911, the library was designed by John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings, who drew inspiration from classical European architecture, as many of New York’s historical landmarks do. The general contractor for the library’s construction was Theodore Starrett of Starrett & Van Vleck. The exterior is clad in white Vermont Danby marble, which immediately captures the attention of passersby. There’s a timeless elegance to the grand staircases leading to towering Corinthian columns. The facade makes you feel important as you enter, a fitting sentiment given that knowledge is power. You also feel empowered by the iconic lion statues, Patience and Fortitude. These beautiful beasts were designed by Edward Clark Potter and carved from pink Tennessee marble by the Piccirilli Brothers, an Italian family of stonemasons who also worked on several other major sculptures around the city. Inside, the library is equally breathtaking, with vast reading rooms, high vaulted ceilings, and exquisite woodwork complementing the stone. There are several places to study, including a rooftop terrace. The library stands as a symbol of the city’s dedication to knowledge, culture, and architectural excellence.

Next, you’ll find another stunning example of Beaux-Arts architecture uptown: The Ansonia. This residential building on the Upper West Side, at the corner of Broadway and 73rd Street, was completed in 1904 and designed by French architect Paul E. Duboy. Originally built as a luxurious hotel, the construction was overseen by Michael Reid & Co. The building’s striking limestone and brick facade is adorned with sculptural details, rounded corner towers, and a mansard roof that evokes Parisian architecture. The Ansonia has hosted many celebrities, including Bobby Short, Babe Ruth, and Angela Lansbury. In the 1970s, it was also home to Plato’s Retreat, a famous swingers’ club. I can’t help but wonder if the club’s founders simply wanted an extravagant building to match their extravagant evenings. The Ansonia is undeniably a part of New York’s cultural fabric. Its location, just steps from Central Park, adds to its appeal. For geology enthusiasts, Central Park is a real treat, as the exposed bedrock and Manhattan Schist peek out among the high-profile residences.

A short walk through the west side of the park also brings you to my next featured building: 220 Central Park South. Designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and completed in 2019, this neo-classical skyscraper is clad in Alabama Silver Limestone and is the most contemporary structure on my list. Rising 953 feet, the tower features a setback structure, large windows, and intricate detailing with Art Deco influences. Lendlease, an Australian construction giant, served as the main contractor. Amid the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of “Billionaire’s Row,” this cream-coloured beauty stands out as a testament to modern luxury and refinement. The history of Central Park South itself is intertwined with New York’s social and real estate evolution, but for now, I’ll also just bring attention to the Irish Connemara marble that graces the entrance arch.

We then travel downtown to another significant landmark: 1 Wall Street. Originally built as the Irving Trust Bank, this building is sometimes called “the other Art Deco skyscraper.” Though it doesn’t have a massive spire or antenna like the Empire State Building, it still has its own charm and sculptural beauty. Completed in 1931, the building was designed by architect Ralph Walker, with the construction overseen by Marc Eidlitz & Son, Inc. The exterior, clad in Indiana limestone, features a streamlined vertical design with subtle geometric ornamentation and detailing. Inside, the building boasts the spectacular Red Room, a mosaic-clad lobby designed by Hildreth Meière. In recent years, it’s been converted into luxury residences, blending historical grandeur with contemporary living. I had the privilege of touring one of the remodelled residences last year with the Institute of Classical Art and Architecture. The area around 1 Wall Street is also historically rich, with cobblestones laid during the industrial boom in the 1800s, mimicking the original Dutch paving from when the area was known as New Amsterdam. There’s so much history beneath your feet.

Finally, I’d like to highlight the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building, one of New York’s most important government structures. The building was designed to accommodate the increased governmental space demands after the 1898 consolidation of the city’s five boroughs. Completed in 1914 and designed by William M. Kendall of McKim, Mead & White, the building exemplifies ancient Roman influences with its classical detailing and colonnade. It’s truly a monumental structure—one of those buildings that makes you exclaim, “People just don’t make these anymore!” The building’s primary materials include Ashlar granite and terracotta, and it features a central tower crowned by the gilded statue ‘Civic Fame,’ sculpted by Adolph A. Weinman. The Thompson–Starrett Company, a leading construction firm of the early 20th century, built the Municipal Building. One of its most unique features is its integration with the subway system, an innovation in early 20th-century urban planning. This was originally where the metro trains were supposed to meet, but that location was switched to Grand Central Station. As I hope you can tell by reading this far, I admire fine details: the many reliefs above are adorned with shields, including one with a beaver, a nod to John Astor and his family’s fortune made in the beaver pelt trade.

This area of downtown is often overlooked by locals, with many of my friends saying they “never get down there.” However, after I shared my stone-seeking adventures with them, they expressed appreciation for the reminder to explore. The highlight of my photography session was when a woman passing by stopped me to ask about the ceiling of the arch I was photographing. She had never noticed the detail before and was grateful for the new perspective. My job was done.

Though I say this comically, it genuinely gave me joy to show someone else the hidden stone details of New York’s built environment. I enjoy learning how things came to be and discovering where the materials came from. I enjoy getting to sit and reflect about the stonemasons and construction workers who used their muscles and minds to build these structures. I enjoy analysing why these works of art instill awe in me everyday.  Most of all, I hope this inspires at least one other person to look up and research the fascinating history behind their favourite building.

Clare Howcutt-Kelly visits stonemasons Mick Teale and his son, Ben at one of the largest and most spectacular Elizabethan houses in the UK.

Burghley House in Lincolnshire is known for many things including the Horse Trials and has played a starring role in many period dramas including The Crown. And while all these things are wonderful, there’s two people who aren’t part of the cast or riding in on horseback but are equally as important. And that’s Mick Teale and his son Ben who are the in-house stonemasons.

The house was built between 1555 and 1587 by William Cecil who was Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I. When we say he built it however, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t on the tools.

Like most powerful men of his time however, he wanted his house to have some serious kerb appeal and it most certainly did. With some 115 rooms and an array of architectural features that were designed to impress, it’s a show-stopper of the highest order.

And it’s believed he wanted to impress Queen Elizabeth I more than anyone else – creating a bedroom just for her. The twist in the tale is that a member of the Burghley household contracted smallpox and although she was close by, she wasn’t able to go inside the house. You’d be pretty annoyed, right?

The stone used to build the house is a golden limestone quarried from land owned by Cecil at nearby King’s Cliffe and the roof is Collyweston slate, also sourced locally. Much of what Mick and Ben work with is reclaimed from across Burghley’s vast estate which comprises many properties and buildings.

Unlike the stone, Mick and Ben aren’t native to the area – the Teale family relocated from Doncaster in 2023. Mick wasn’t new to Burghley, though. In 2021, he was part of the team who worked on the restoration of Burghley’s iconic 18th Century Lion Bridge designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

One of Burghley’s key features are its 76 Tuscan order chimneys – this might seem excessive but this was a man out to impress Elizabeth I remember – and her entourage of 100 people would surely need a few fires? On the roof there’s also decorative cupolas and pinnacles and much more besides.

The 16th century clock tower at Burghley House is a particularly striking feature which is topped by a pyramid shaped obelisk with a clock face flanked by lions. The columns are a nod to ancient Greek architectural order with stocky Doric columns at the bottom, then ionic with its scroll details known as volutes and on top, the most ornate Corinthian columns.

When I visit Ben and Mick we head up onto the roof so they can show me what they’ve been working on. The father son team recently took down some of the chimneys, taking them back to the top of the Romanesque columns before rebuilding and re-leading the joints. Each weighed around 2.5 tonnes which is no small feat.

Working and living with your dad isn’t for everyone but for these two, it works.

“Of course, it’s just the two of us but he does push me and it pushes me more than I could push myself. Sometimes he gets on my nerves but he’s my dad at the end of the day and he’s an incredibly experienced mason,” says Ben.

They have an ease about them and laugh frequently. Mick has been a stonemason for decades but Ben started off on a different path studying Sport and Exercise Therapy at Leeds Beckett University.

Currently training at Moulton College, Ben is an apprentice stonemason who mainly focuses on banker masonry.

I watch the two together and you can see how proud Mick is to have his son by his side. “He’s really got into stonemasonry. Ben talks a lot about stone even when we're at home and we have a laugh.”

Mick started his own journey into construction in 1994 originally training as a bricklayer at Doncaster College before being offered a job by Historic Property Restoration Ltd who put him through his banker masonry training at York College. He would go on to spend 23 years with the company working on some of the most significant monuments in the UK.

The length of his tenure is testament to the joy his work brings him and when you’re in his company, his expression tells me this is a person with many stories. And of course, Ben is fortunate enough to work with his dad everyday benefiting from his experience and a few wisecracks, no doubt.

“We’ve got to keep the heritage skills alive and engage the younger generation”, says Mick. “If we don’t, what will happen in 20 years’ time when we’ve all retired and we’ve got nobody coming through. Who’s going to look after these incredible buildings?”

Apprenticeships, he says, are massively important and while other trades are easily accessible via training at colleges across the UK, options to train in stonemasonry at college are limited. Currently Bath College, City & Guilds of London Art School, Moulton College and York College are the only educational institutes that offer it.

Ben explains the challenges: “I’m lucky to have my dad with so much experience but if you’re starting out in stonemasonry at college, it’s not like bricklaying where you’ll have a class of 60 people and someone has a mate who has a mate on a site who can help you get a job.”

Pride is a word that comes up a lot during our conversation once we head back to the workshop where the Teale’s ‘dust dog’, Olive, is excitedly waiting for us.

“Every piece we work on is a piece of pride”, Ben explains and Mick agrees, “but we don’t show off our heritage skills nearly enough. People will often look at a building, see the enormous features like the chimneys at Burghley and not realise someone’s made that. It’s all possible.”

Ben admits that he seeks perfection in his work and will tweak and tweak until he’s happy with it. “You’ve got pretty high standards. Sometimes too high,” Mick tells him. “It’s when you keep tweaking that you can make mistakes.”

This is the voice of a master mason as well as a proud dad. Olive snuggles into Mick as he ruffles her head. She has the easiest job of all – just being cute.

Before I leave, I ask Ben what his favourite part of the job is. He doesn’t need to think too long.

“I love being able to work on the house to be honest. It’s a great stature of work and I’m proud to be one of the many stonemasons who’ve worked on it over the years.”

For more about Burghley House visit burghley.co.uk

Follow Ben 

• Instagram at @benteale_ 

• TikTok @ben_teale18

Clare Howcutt-Kelly meets Ryan James 

A blue Transit pulls up outside my house at about 5am one morning in May. It’s riding suspiciously low as if laden with a load of gold bullion. The driver – tall with a no-nonsense Yorkshire accent – invites me to look in the back. I slide open the door and on the floor is something bulky. It is not gold but it is precious, and I’m shocked it’s not protected with bubble wrap at the very least.

“It weighs a tonne. Literally”, he explains with a tone that suggests I worry too much, “Well, it won’t go anywhere will it?”

It is going somewhere. It’s going to RHS Chelsea Flower Show and we’re going, too. But ahead of us is a three-hour drive into central London in a questionable motor.

Ryan James is a sculptor and carver and the work in the back of the van is a wall fountain for designer Holly Johnston’s Bridgerton-inspired garden sponsored by Netflix at the Show. Carved from a single block of sandstone, it features a cameo portrait of Penelope Featherington accompanied by the words ‘even a wallflower can bloom’ which are, Ryan says, carved to resemble the Netflix font.

I have packed a Thermos of tea and Ryan rummages around before offering a stained old mug to have a quick brew before we set off. There is an ease about Ryan – he lives in the moment, talks freely and is solutions-orientated. Conversation is easy, the opposite of trying to get blood out of a stone.

Ryan has a degree in fine art from Plymouth University but when it comes to sculpture and carving, he is self-taught. When I first visited his workshop at Traditional Stone in Horbury he admitted he didn’t know the names of all the tools, but who cares? He most definitely has command of them.

He’s been figuring out his own way most of his life and, as we talk – I can hear the voice of his inner child; his wonder and curiosity has never been snared by the trap that can, at times, be adult life with its routines and responsibilities.

His parents Dean and Susan, brother, Sean and wife Jade are, he reveals, his biggest influences.

“Mum’s really artistic and my dad’s a builder, but he’s always had an artistic side. Whenever we’d go on holiday, he’d always be pointing out the architectural carvings and features. I’ve always loved da Vinci and the way he figured stuff out and that type of that drawing – a fusion of engineering and art.”

Surprisingly – and I must suppress a smile when he says this – at 14, he was a member of the local walking stick making club. Every Thursday night, he would “go to this working men’s club, have a pint of John Smith’s and talk about walking sticks.” An interesting hobby for a teenager in the 90s perhaps, but he won first prize at the Penistone Show for the first stick he ever made – so who’s laughing now?

“I loved making walking sticks, loved whittling with my penknife. Me and my brother used to carve out initials into a potato and melt lead on a fire in the garden and pour it in. I loved anything to do with carving and I remember Sean and me always up to something. He's always been really creative and is fantastic at drawing. He produces really quirky stuff and has helped me come up with some great ideas."

By eight, he was carving stone – an ammonite first (which is on display in his workshop) and then his dad taught him the basics of carving and lettering: “I carved an Elvis sign for my nan because we’re all huge Elvis fans.” Later, his GCSE coursework carvings included a mouse and a snake.

Of all the work he keeps in his studio, a portrait of his granddad, Leonard, is perhaps the most poignant. Carved in Spanish alabaster, he completed it during lockdown as a tribute to his granddad and the older generations who struggled with isolation when restrictions were imposed.

When he talks about what and who inspires him, there is more than a doff of the cap to the North’s industrial heritage. “There’s sculpture in what they did –old bridges and things that they made.”

Yorkshire’s rival county, Lancashire also produced one of his heroes, Fred Dibnah.

“Skint Northerners worked hard but didn’t really reap the financial rewards. My granddad used to work in the pit as an engineer so doing a portrait of my him came from all that, I wanted to celebrate a normal working man rather than being a portrait of a royal or a famous person. Art shouldn’t just be a luxury for the rich.”

For immortalising his granddad, he won the Tony Stones Award at the Society of Portrait Sculptors FACE2021 exhibition. It was this piece that gave Ryan the push to become a full-time sculptor. But it wouldn't have been possible without the support of Jade who continued to work full time.

“Jade is mega. I run all my ideas by her first. I tend to go for a more monochrome colour palette but Jade brings colour into every aspect of our life together.”

At primary school, Simon Todd, a Yorkshire artist and creator of wood and stone site-specific sculpture gave a talk at his school which also sparked something in the boy who loved his pencils.

And his pencils are still one of his favourite tools today, you’ll find them all over his workshop and tucked behind his right ear. He begins each project with a highly-detailed sketch before working out the scale. I’ve never seen him use a computer and there’s no mention of CAD software here. Instead, he keeps A4 hardbound sketchbooks close by and fills them with intricate drawings of projects in various stages – some just seeds of ideas that might one day bloom.

As coincidence would have it, one of his first sculptures was carved on site where Simon Todd’s wooden statue had once stood in the village of Clayton West where Ryan spent his childhood. Called the Spirit of Clayton West Sculpture, it celebrates the local heritage and those who contribute to the community; there are nods to his own family – his grandfather worked at a local mine while his grandmothers both worked in the mills. There are local landmarks carved into the stone including the church where his parents were married and plenty of animals including his dog Eiger, (who died before it was completed) are also carved there.

One of his most notable projects was the creation of two four-tonne griffins for a private client. You’ll struggle to spot the differences between the pair of them although he can. This process for him was I think, a defining moment in his career and he developed his own working methods – a numbered grid system hand drawn onto each griffin, the use of a mirror and trial and error. Thankfully, not too much of the latter. He shared much of his progress on his Instagram account, and this was how most people came to know his name.

For the griffins, he used Howley Park sandstone quarried in North Yorkshire. Clare Dunn who worked for Marshalls at the time made the introduction and arranged for Ryan to visit the quarry and select the blocks. The team at Traditional Stone transported them back and prepared them by cutting a flat base. When the griffins left the workshop months later, you could sense these beasts had clawed their way into his heart and made an impression that would remain with him for a lifetime.

By Ryan’s own admission, 2024 was an epic one, completing the griffins, creating the Bridgerton bespoke fountain and he also travelled to New South Wales to work with fellow Yorkshire native, Emma Knowles, founder of Stone of Arc and The Great Australian Stone Festival.

In 2024, Ryan also expanded his team with the addition of Endrit Rama who had worked for a larger company back home in Albania. With a degree in Classical Sculpture his drawings, like Ryan’s are intricate. Of Endrit, Ryan says: “He’s brilliant, very learned with clear methods and knows how to do mega architectural carvings. He knows all sorts of techniques and I’ve already learned a lot from him.”

Endrit’s first large-scale project with Ryan was the bust of a Highland cow and animals –  real or mythical –  are often being shaped into life in the workshop. He spends a lot of time studying anatomy with a focus of muscle definition and his pursuit of translating fluid forms into stone can verge on obsession: “I can’t let things go if they aren’t right. That’ll do just isn’t me. I’m striving for perfection.” He reveals he dreams of creating a monument “like those in Trafalgar Square or Nelson’s Column.”

Author Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” and although he died in 1882, he could have been talking about Ryan.

Ryan’s career will certainly outlive that Transit van, navigating bumps in the road in his own way and with plenty of humour.

There will be stories to tell – in a Yorkshire accent, of course.

• Ryan can be found on Instagram @rjjsculptor