28 April was World Day for Safety & Health at Work and WJ Group, which paints the lines on roads all over the country, made it its mission to make the roads safer by getting people in the construction industry to drive better.

WJ Group has just won a National Highways Industry Award for excellence in safety, learning and culture thanks to a system it has implemented in its business to try to get its drivers to drive better and be safer. It is now encouraging other companies throughout the construction industry to do the same and is offering to help them do so.

The road marking and highway safety specialist's driver behaviour scheme allowed WJ to review the performance of each of its drivers and combine it with ongoing and significant rewards to maintain standards.

WJ used its vehicle telematics system, which measures driver performance by analysing acceleration, speed, braking, driving style, fuel consumption, daily vehicle checks for compliance, and various other metrics, to develop a traffic light categorisation of its drivers: 0%–84.9% is red (underperforming), 85%–89.9% is amber (average), and 90%–100% is green (good).

Scott Logan, Transport Manager at WJ Group, says: “The key to safety is understanding the conditions your staff work in and the associated risks. At WJ, we recognised that driving is one of the primary risks not only to our own workforce but to colleagues and other road users. That’s how we identified that the most effective way we could address safety was through improving driver behaviour.”

Other changes the company has made include redesigned vehicles, extensive training, enhanced PPE, new technology and Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme (FORS) accreditation.

Now WJ wants other businesses to adopt similar strategies to improve safety on the highways.

Scott adds: “To alter attitudes, there needs to be a real incentive for colleagues to fully embody the values of the business.

"For us, we award the top three and most improved drivers from each depot with monthly and yearly bonuses. Then the winners are published on our internal social media platform to maintain awareness of the scheme among everyone. This is a great way to harbour a culture of safety within our teams.

“Since introducing the scheme, we’ve seen real improvements.

"When we began, the average performance across the group was 87.58%. Our most recent scores showed it is consistently over 95% – a massive improvement. This has resulted in a 40% reduction in the number of accidents we’ve had and a 44.87% decrease in the costs associated with these accidents. Using data like this really helps to understand the success and failures when implementing new processes.

“Overall, our driver behaviour scheme has been a great success all round, not only delivering significant benefits for the business, but giving our drivers something to strive towards. We are now presenting this across the industry, allowing other organisations to replicate the success we have had and making the roads safe for all.

"We’re encouraging organisations in all industries to take a similar approach to creating a safety culture.”

To find out more about the WJ Group scheme and how it could be applied to your business, click here.

London Stone, the now nationwide hard landscaping materials supplier, has opened its seventh showroom.

The new 450m2 showroom is in Eastleigh, Hampshire, close to the M3 and just eight minutes from junction five of the M27.

The new branch boasts inspirational hard landscaping material displays, including natural stone, porcelain, clay pavers, composite decking, and pergolas and planters.

Steve Walley, London Stone's Managing Director, says: “We’re incredibly excited to open our newest showroom in Eastleigh. We’re looking forward to establishing a relationship with the local community and hope to increase footfall to the surrounding businesses.

"I'm incredibly proud of the new showroom. It’s looking fantastic and is a great setting to view our materials in situ.”

More new London Stone showrooms will be opening soon in Bristol and Altrincham, Greater Manchester, and London Stone also has three existing partner showrooms in Cheshire, Hartlepool and Kent.

London Stone also recently announced that from 2023 it has been certified as carbon neutral. Read more about that here.

Demonstrate your decarbonisation commitment with the revised PAS 2080. Download free here. 

BSI has published a new version of its PAS 2080 on managing and reducing carbon in the built environment, which enables companies to demonstrate their commitment to decarbonisation.

PAS stands for Publicly Available Specification, which means it is free, thanks to the sponsorship of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the Green Construction Board (GCB). It is also supported by the Construction Leadership Council.

The guidance document, first published in 2016, now includes case studies where the standard has been applied and provides worked examples to assist further with the application and integration of this specification.

The scope has been expanded, with a new emphasis on whole life carbon and a more focused alignment with the Government’s aim of achieving a Net Zero carbon economy by 2050.

PAS 2080:2023 specifies requirements for the management of whole-life carbon in buildings and infrastructure in the provision, operation, use and end-of-life of new projects or programmes of work, as well as the management or retrofit of existing buildings and schemes.

It helps individual companies to understand their impact on the wider network, revealing interdependencies and encouraging early collaboration. It requires the definition of roles and responsibilities and integrated decision-making and procurement processes throughout the lifecycle of a building or other works.

One benefit of reducing carbon is that it almost invariably saves money. Follow Pas 2080 and you can expect to see reductions in material, energy and labour costs during the project, as well as reductions in whole-life capital and operational costs.

The specification aims to:

• Encourage wider uptake and action on carbon management
• Demonstrate your commitment to carbon reduction
• Help give you a competitive edge when bidding for tenders
• Help construction adapt to a low carbon future
• Help users develop their expertise of carbon management
• Help users increase confidence and trust in their practice.

BSI is committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with PAS 2080:2023 contributing to Goal 9 on industry, innovation and infrastructure, Goal 11 on sustainable cities and communities, Goal 12 on responsible consumption and production and Goal 13 on climate action.

Covid put Stamford Stone’s plans for a new factory workshop on hold following planning approval for a 43-acre extension to Clipsham Bidwells quarry. But now those plans are moving ahead.

See Stamford Stone at:

Inflation and the cost of living crisis might still be hitting the headlines from time to time but companies cannot wait for ever to achieve their ambitions and for Stamford Stone (the name of which is now a registered trade mark) the time has come to move on.

Stamford Stone extracts Clipsham limestone from its Bidwells and Medwells quarries in Clipsham, Rutland. Achieving planning permission for mineral extraction always takes a long time and obtaining it for the 43-acre extension of Clipsham Bidwells quarry was no exception, even though much of the preliminary work had been carried out by the previous owners, Clipsham Quarry Company, before Stamford Stone bought the company, including 300-acres of land and 1,800 acres of mineral reserves, in 2018.

Planning permission was finalised and extraction started in the 43-acre extension in 2021. Although Stamford Stone Company had been able to carry on working throughout the pandemic, due to the nature of its work being mostly in the open air or isolated with machinery, Director Daniel Wilson did not think the past two years were the right time for more investment.

Now, with a bulging order book, he sees no reason for waiting any longer and plans to go ahead with building a new, 7,000m2 factory workshop at Clipsham Bidwells quarry.

In fact, he admits that “had we not been watching the news for the past six months we probably would have cracked on with it already”.

Having a factory in the quarry will mean the raw block will not have to travel 20 miles-or-so to Stamford Stone’s factory and showroom in Helpston to be processed.

That will reduce its carbon footprint, not to mention transport costs – and, when you are transporting raw block, despite much of it already being scanted in the quarries – a proportion of  what you are moving is waste. Having a factory in the quarry would mean transporting more finished product.

Planning limits how much stone can be moved out of the quarry, and although that limit is fairly high at 170,000 tonnes a year from Clipsham Bidwells quarry, it is preferable to have as much of it as possible leaving as high value finished or semi-finished product, especially as the initial yields from the newly consented area are better than expected.

At the top of the quarry is Bidwell Clipsham, with its distinctive bands. Below that are plainer beds of Lincolnshire limestone, and below that, harder Clipsham Cream, which is currently being used for an elaborate private new-build in London, although Stamford Stone has signed an NDA on that and can’t say anything about it except that it is truly impressive.

Of course, cores were taken from the new area to anticipate the yields but, as Dan says, you never know precisely what you will find until you actually open up a quarry.

Stamford Stone’s plan is to reduce the carbon footprint still further by generating renewable electricity with wind turbines and / or solar panels on about 100 acres of the 300 it bought along with the quarry. It sees another potential carbon benefit from offsetting by extending the existing 70 acres of woodland on the site. It believes it could also help other companies achieve net carbon neutrality by selling offsetting.

Dan says Bidwells quarry could be energy self-sufficient from renewables but had been equivocating about whether to connect to the national grid in order to feed into it and, if necessary, draw from it. But the connection point is not close by and he describes the cost of connection as “astronomical”.

The issue might have been settled by a company that is looking for land on which to put extensive banks of batteries to even out the peaks and troughs of sustainable electricity production. It charges the batteries during peaks and feeds the electricity into the grid during troughs.

Not only would the company pay to house its batteries on Stamford Stone’s land, it would also meet the cost of connecting to the national grid (because it does not have a business without the connection). Dan says it is something other quarry operators might like to look at and he would be happy to talk to them about it.

There is also a new management structure at Stamford Stone. Although the company had continued working during the Covid pandemic, some of the 48 people there were furloughed during the early days and Dan and his sister and fellow Director, Laura Green, got stuck in to even more of the work than usual.

Dan has said previously how beneficial that proved to be by making them aware of some of the inefficiencies of the production process and how they could be improved.

But it also made them aware that they were still running the business as if it employed the 11 people who were there when they took over the day to day running of the business eight years ago. That in itself was less than optimally efficient because they were spending too much time working in the business rather than managing its development.

Consequently, a senior management team has now been developed that sees Tom Arlow in charge of the two quarries assisted by Louisa Turner. Alan Hanrahan has joined the company to add his expertise in logistics as Operations Manager, setting budgets and controlling costs. Tony James is Production Manager at the factory in Helpston with Ricky Parkinson as Plant Maintenance Manager, keeping the company at the forefront with new plant and machinery both in the quarries and in the production facilities. Wendy Ivatt and Richard Hall head the draughting and estimating team, which is expanding due to the amount of large commercial projects the company is now involved in.

More economies might come from building a road between Bidwells and Medwells quarries. That would enable lorries from both to access the A1 without having to go through the village of Stretton, which would help to keep the neighbouring residents happy.

Even though the two quarries are close together, they have differing characteristics and the stones are sold separately and at different price points. Dan says Clipsham Medwells is the best choice for sky facing applications such as cappings.

Block from both quarries is sold to a dozen or so masonry companies and walling and flooring stone is also sold business-to-business, with most of the walling stone sold through builders merchants, especially when it goes to the Cotswolds and further north, such as Harrogate. It is generally white labelled as ‘Lincolnshire stone’ to carry the merchant’s branding.

Although there is a growing commercial imperative to be seen as environmentally friendly, it is something that Dan says he and his family have always tried to achieve.

Carbon reduction has clearly grown in significance, but biodiversity is also an issue and it is often forgotten how many quarries and former quarries are designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs).

At Clipsham Medwells quarry there are significant areas of calcareous grassland that are home to some of the country’s rarer fauna and flora. And there are protected Peregrine falcons nesting in rock faces.

There is no blasting in the quarries and even a factory in Medwells would be inconspicuously within the quarry with minimal noise from the machinery. In fact, Dan currently has planning applications in for off-grid eco-pods for people to escape to, away from technology and modern living, in the original ‘Big Pits Quarry’, which ceased being worked in the 1980s.

Stone from Clipsham Bidwells has taken its place alongside the stone from Clipsham Medwells, and in the product display area at Helpston even sits comfortably alongside the imported stones that Stamford Stone sells for hard landscaping, much of it these days from Morocco and Egypt. The stone is sourced from ethical quarries, says Stamford Stone. 

Much of the Clipsham masonry goes to the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford, both for conservation and new build. One of the projects currently taking 400m3 of Clipsham is the new Stephen A Schwarzman Centre for Humanities at Oxford, which resulted from a CPD presentation Stamford Stone gave to the architects at Hopkins three years ago. “We do a lot of CPD presentations,” says Dan. A team from the project, where Vetter Laing O’Rourke is the contractor, visited Clipsham Bidwells quarry to select the blocks wanted well in advance of the start of the construction work.

Other Oxford College projects, both with Szerelmey, are at Rhodes House and Corpus Christie, respectively using 40m3 and 70m3 of Clipsham limestone

Right now Stamford Stone is also gearing up for the Natural Stone Show at ExCeL in London in June (you will find the company on stand F56). “We always try to bring quite a lot of project images as well as a great range of samples from both our Clipsham quarries,” says Dan.

With talk of recession now less common than it was at the end of last year, Dan believes he is justified in feeling optimistic. “We’re geared up now for a good time ahead. With some exciting projects, plentiful supply of the finest limestone and a great team of people, we’re excited about the future.”

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the MP who is better known as The Speaker of the House of Commons, has visited non-flammable hard surfaces façade manufacturer Shackerley, based in Euxton, a village in the MP’s Chorley constituency in Lancashire.

Shackerley supplies its façade systems to projects across the UK and beyond, and has been a major employer and a thriving business in Euxton for more than 50 years.

Since the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017 it has seen significant growth in demand for its non-combustible stone, ceramic and brick rainscreen cladding systems, made at its ISO 9001-accredited factories in Lancashire.

That growth has led to the substantial investment in an additional factory, doubling the company’s manufacturing capacity. With the new factory has come new machinery, new technology and additional storage facilities.

The expansion has led to job security for Shackerley’s existing team and the creation of new jobs along with a boost for the company’s supply chain.

Sir Lindsay’s visit enabled the MP to tour one of Shackerley’s Lancashire factories, witnessing the company’s quality assured manufacturing processes and patented, Queen’s Award-winning façade systems.

Sir Lindsay was able to chat to staff to find out more about how new jobs at Shackerley are helping to create sustainable employment and support the levelling up agenda in Lancashire.

Founder and CEO of Shackerley, Lancashire entrepreneur Brian Newell, who was made an MBE in the 2022 New Year’s Honours, greeted Sir Lindsay at the company’s headquarters. He talked him through the Shackerley product range and some of the recent projects where the façades have been used, such as the Student accommodation in Leeds with its natural limestone cladding featured in Natural Stone Specialist magazine in 2021 (read that here).

Brian explained what the investment programme will mean for future growth potential and local jobs. And as he toured the factory with his guest, he explained to Sir Lindsay how Shackerley’s custom-built machinery works, as well as highlighting the company’s best practice approach to quality checks, product testing and traceability.

Brian Newell commented: “We are delighted that Sir Lindsay Hoyle has taken time out of his busy schedule to come and see what we do here at Shackerley, learning more about our contribution to both the local economy and the construction industry.

“We are proud to be innovators in the façade sector and to have raised the bar for our industry in terms of quality and safety. Sir Lindsay’s visit was a great opportunity to showcase all of that.”

Having showcased it, Shackerley is now hoping for plenty more order orders.

The 51 churches in the City of London rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire in 1666 are this year commemorating the 300th anniversary of Sir Christopher’s death.

Part of the activities in what is being called WREN300 is a series of workshops and presentations about the conservation skills used in the maintenance of the churches, which include Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral.

The first of the workshops, involving the stonework of the churches, were presented last week at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street by stone and conservation specialist Cliveden Conservation, which is among the companies that help to keep the churches in such good condition.

The first workshop on 12 April focused on stone cleaning, showing how the superheated water and laser products of, respectively, Restorative Techniques and Terra Measurement can be used to clean stonework.

There were also demonstrations of the HD3D digital surveys of the churches being carried out as part of the WREN300 programme by Terra Measurement using photogrammetry and point cloud laser technology, creating millimetre accurate digital twins of the churches.

In the evening, Oliver Caroe, one of the country’s foremost ecclesiastical architects who is the Surveyor of the Fabric of St Paul’s Cathedral, discussed the stonework renovation and alterations at St Paul’s, including the new accessibility ramps built by Stonewest.

Presentations about the broader use of stone in sustainable ways, particularly for new-build, were given by stonemason extraordinaire Pierre Bidaud of The Stonemasonry Company and engineer Steve Webb from Webb Yates.

They provided ‘A walk through the New Stone Age’, offering solutions in stone construction, notably with the use of post-tensioning, in the context of today’s social and environmental challenges, not least global warming. The evening rounded off with an opportunity for the audience to talk to the presenters informally over glasses of wine.

The following day, visitors were able to have a go at lettercutting, marking out and lime pointing during a stonemasonry experience day, again at St Bride’s, with Cliveden explaining about mortar repairs, indent repairs, repointing, mortar and stone analysis.

These and future workshops covering the conservation of metal, glass, wood, and plaster/paint are free, but the churches ask anyone wishing to attend to register, so they know how many people to expect.

There are various other events taking place as part of WREN300, including a Wrenathon of choirs from across the City of London and beyond in a 12-day festival in June taking place in several of the Square Mile Churches.

Details of all the events and booking for them (some are not free) can be found on the Square Mile Churches’ website.

Below are some photographs from Cliveden's events.

Registration to attend the Natural Stone Show and Hard Surfaces is open online at: tinyurl.com/NSS-HSregistration

The Natural Stone Show returns to ExCeL Exhibition Centre in London 6-8 June. For the second time it co-locates with Hard Surfaces to encompass the full range of products stone companies use. Both Shows include a seminar programme to explore industry trends and inspire innovation.

One of the best things about seminars is that they inspire you to think about the seeds of the ideas they sow. By the time you get back to your business you might well be ready to develop the next major evolution of your firm.

Everyone knows it’s good to step back from simply meeting the relentless requirements of everyday business to allow time for strategic thinking, but it certainly is hard to find time to do that. So make the most of the opportunity a visit to the Natural Stone Show and Hard Surfaces exhibitions and their seminar programmes present.

Seminars: The Full Programme

The full schedules for the seminar programmes at the Natural Stone Show and Hard Surfaces are on the websites of the exhibitions: www.stoneshow.co.uk and www.hardsurfaces.co.uk. On the websites you will also find listed all the exhibitors with their stand numbers. The seminars will take place in specifically created seminar studios on the exhibition floor.

Booking is not required to attend the seminars, although architects who would like to join the organisers for lunch following the Industry Choice Award presentation on 6 June should register at: bit.ly/architectsday23.

The exhibitions themselves were casualties of Covid and could not be held in their usual two-yearly cycle in 2021, although the Stone Show organisers did present a two-day conference online under the name of Stone Digital. The sessions attracted an overall audience of more than 1,600 people.

There is not room for 1,600 people to attend the seminars at ExCeL, which are taking place in the exhibition hall this time to make it easier for visitors to transition between the exhibition stands and the seminars they want to participate in.

Understandably, as it is four years since the previous Natural Stone Show, there will be a lot for visitors to catch up with and no doubt there will be a lot on the stands of exhibitors that visitors will want to see.

But Covid and the completion of Brexit have created a new normal that the sessions of the seminars of both exhibitions will explore and explain.

The seminars at the Natural Stone Show are themed by day – Tuesday is Architects Day, Wednesday is Industry Day and Thursday is Conservation Day. There is plenty of crossover of interests, but the themes are there to make each day’s topics of particular interest to the target audience.

The CPD-accredited presentations on Architects Day, for example, are specifically designed to help architects to understand stone and how it is used in the built environment, with Stone Federation Great Britain playing a leading role.

The seminar sessions will include case study presentations about the winning projects in the Natural Stone Awards that were presented by Stone Federation at London’s Leonardo Royal Tower Bridge Hotel in December.

Studies in Stone

It was announced at the Stone Awards presentation ceremony that the industry would be invited to choose a ‘best of the best’ from among the category winners to find an overall Industry Choice Award winner. The Industry Choice Award will be presented during Architects Day at the Stone Show following the Studies in Stone presentations of the category-winning projects by the architects involved in them. Among the practices involved in the category winners are Eric Parry Architects, Feilden Fowles, Gillespies and Caulfield Wright Architects.

Before the Studies in Stone that culminate in the Industry Choice Award being presented, the Architects Day presentations begin at 10am with The What, Why & How of EPDs (Environmental Product Declarations) by Dr Flavie Lowres, a consultant who runs Green Thinking Ltd.

She will explain what EPDs are and the vital role they can play in helping architects to decide which materials should be used in their projects.

Sini Laine, Executive Director of KIVI (formerly the Finnish Natural Stone Association) will then present a case study of an EPD involving natural stone.

In the afternoon, attention will turn to the  Ethical & Responsible Sourcing of natural stone, with David Richardson, Director of Diagenesis Consulting, presenting an overview of the Ethical Stone Register of those in the stone industry who are working towards eliminating modern slavery and human rights infractions from their supply chains.

Marcus Paine, Director of Hutton Stone Company, will then talk about his company’s experience of moving from the Declaration Level to the Verification Level on the Ethical Stone Register.

On Industry Day (7 June), one of the subjects focused on will be training and the retention of skills in a trade that is finding it hard to recruit youngsters to take over from the previous generation, both in traditional hand skills and for the operation of saws and machinery. There will be contributions from Women in Natural Stone (WINS) and the new Stone Academy.

The Day will begin with updates on tackling diversity and the skills gap and changes to local authority planning.

Becca Cranfield, Co-Chair of WINS (Women In Natural Stone) and Director of Athena Stone Care, will talk about the mentoring, networking and support that WINS offers women in the industry.

Stone Federation will explain the aims of its new Stone Academy to bring training and career development in the stone industry together under one banner. Presenting a clear progression path should help recruitment.

Sam Thistlethwaite, Director of IC Planning and Stone Federation’s consultant on planning matters, will provide an update on the new National Planning Policy Framework and how planning authority Design Codes now being developed will help the stone industry.

This will be followed by Setting the Standard, when consultant Peter Harrison will explain what Part Five of the latest version of BS8298 will mean for best practice regarding the design and installation of internal stone cladding and lining. There will also be an explanation of how to use the new  BS7533-101 to deliver sustainable landscape schemes.

David Ellis, a Partner of Sandberg LLP, will introduce Stone Federation’s new code of practice for Natural Stone Installation in Bathrooms, Shower Enclosures and Wet Rooms.

At 3pm, the Emerging Talent Awards will be presented to the 10 people who have been nominated and selected as those most likely to be influential in the stone industry in the years ahead.

The presentation of the Emerging Talent Awards will follow a panel discussion about the skills that will be needed by the next generation of leaders in an age when construction is dominated by digital technology and legislated reductions of greenhouse gasses.

On the panel will be digital transformation  specialist Stefan Mordue, a Chartered Architect and Senior Consultant for Cohesive; sustainability specialist Chloe Newmann, Senior Structural Engineer at Webb Yates; Chris Kelsey, of The Marble & Granite Centre, who is the President of Stone Federation Great Britain. BBC presenter Susannah Streeter will be leading the discussion.

For the seminars on the final day of the Stone Show (8 June) attention turns to heritage, with Historic England curating the discussion, which starts at 10am with Clara Willett, Senior Building Conservation Advisor at Historic England, talking about the launch of the online Building Stones Database for England, developed from the Strategic Stone Study.

The Strategic Stone Study entered information gathered about quarries in England and buildings constructed from those stones on a Geological Information System (GIS) map. A GIS has different layers of information that can be explored. The study also resulted in a series of extremely useful atlases covering particular geographic areas (mostly counties).

The information was gathered and co-ordinated by the British Geological Survey, starting in 2007. Its Strategic Stone Study website shut down at the end of March this year and a new website containing the information is being launched by Historic England under the name of the Building Stones Database for England.

The presentation about the database will be followed by a presentation about another new online tool, Historic Environment Scotland’s Stone Carbon Calculator. Ali Davey, Project Manager of Traditional Skills & Materials at Historic Environment Scotland will be talking about the importance of this new tool as existing buildings try to meet the requirements necessary to reduce the 40% of Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions that come from existing buildings in use.

That leads naturally on to presentations about a number of  current research projects trying to increase the understanding of stone in relation to climate change.

Because stone comes out of the ground as a finished raw material that does not require any high energy transformations in kilns or presses, it starts off with an advantage in the low carbon stakes. Although the sawing and shaping of stone uses electrical machinery, electricity is becoming greener. Even transport has started addressing greenhouse emissions.

The first of the speakers on this subject is John Gedling, Director of Works at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. His presentation is titled Climate Change Adaptations on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Estate.

He will be followed by Dr Philip Skipper who is a consultant at Philip Skipper Heritage Science Services and a researcher at Lincoln University. He will be talking about the bioreceptivity of stone.

Bioreceptivity is a new term introduced to ecology in 1995 to describe the ability of a material to be colonised by living organisms – and you only have to look at stone to see how easily it is colonised by organisms such a lichen. But how do you determine how bioreceptive any particular material is? That is a question Dr Philip Skipper will address in his presentation about the creation of a standardised assessment methodology.

If you don’t like the biology that is inhabiting the stone, you might want to clean it using Ultra Violet-C (UVC), which has been used for decades to reduce the spread of bacteria. UVC is a disinfectant and UVC lamps are also known as germicidal lamps. Andrew More, Senior Building Services Engineer at Historic England, will offer guidance on UVC cleaning.

In the afternoon, attention turns to the sustainable supply of roofing stone and slate with John Owens, Technical Sales Manager at Welsh Slate (part of Breedon Group), talking about the production of slate from its quarries, which include the recently re-opened Ffestiniog Quarry and the largest of the slate quarries in Wales, Penrhyn, that Welsh Slate was given permission to extend last year.

Ian Ramsay, Sales Manager of Burlington, will also talk about the sustainable production of slate and stone by Burlington in Cumbria.

This will be rounded off by a case study of slate roofing.

Tile Trends

Hard Surfaces has its own conference programme located on the Hard Surfaces show floor. As at the Stone Show, it will feature free-to-attend, CPD-accredited seminars. At Hard Surfaces, those seminars  are being curated by tile industry guru Joe Simpson.

They will begin with a look at Global Tile Trends, with an exclusive three-part presentation for Hard Surfaces by Canadian tile aficionado Ryan Fasan, technical consultant to Tile of Spain USA.

A session entitled Decoration & Detail will explore how age-old techniques are being supplemented by advanced digital inkjet decorating technologies to reinvigorate the market for traditional artisan tiles as factories create increasingly authentic-looking facsimiles.

Representing the hand-made sector, Peter Wood, Managing Director of Royce Wood Tiles, will provide the back story to his company’s signature glaze effects, exploring colour, material flow, and the visual alchemy of reactive glazes.

Sean Kennard, UK Sales Manager for one of Italy’s most respected tile manufacturers, Atlas Concorde, will explain how the creation of diverse ranges of tonally balanced tiles permits specification without concern, by guaranteeing perfect colour matches across different series from an extensive product portfolio.

Environmental Edge will provide detailed analysis of tile’s green credentials, covering water re-use, embodied energy and energy co-generation, recycled content, raw material sourcing, transport and logistics, installation, durability, maintenance, and end-of-life options.

The keynote speaker at the Hard Surfaces seminars will be Mauro Rullo, representing the Italian ceramic manufacturers’ trade association Confindustria Ceramica.

He will share the podium with Emilio Mudrak and Laurens Van Graafeiland.  Emilio represents one of the world’s largest and most technically advanced tile manufacturing groups, Iris Ceramica, while Laurens is CEO of sector-leading green surfaces manufacturer Sustonable.

Representing the UK distribution sector, David Kong, Marketing Director of Domus, will use his experience as The Tile Association’s (TTA’s) lead on sustainability, to provide some hard facts on the green credentials of ceramics, and provide pointers towards a more sustainable future for hard surfaces.

With porcelain growing in popularity for exteriors as well as interiors, Elementary Exteriors will explore just why the market for 20mm and 30mm outdoor tiles has exploded. It will cover dry, pedestal, and adhesive laying systems and look at the trend for inside-out living. Speakers include Eric Garcia Millan, from leading Spainish 20mm tile manufacturer Rocersa.

This session will include an informed discussion on the controversial subjects of slip resistance and testing by Richard Bowman, from Intertile Research, one of the world’s acknowledged experts.

Façade Fashions will explore the exponential rise of ventilated ceramic façades with the look of stone and marble, metals, concrete and timber. It will be led by Nic Shannon, Managing Director of Domus Façades, one of the UK’s major cladding contractors, who will be joined by Aaron Capon, National Façades Manager of Dekton and Silestone manufacturer Cosentino.

Installation Insights will investigate topics surrounding the handling and installation of XXL format tiles, including levelling systems, and tools to facilitate handling of these extra large pieces safely and securely on site.

This will draw on the expertise of Italian tool brand Brevetti Montolit, represented by Jason Smith, and Rubi, the leading Spanish tool manufacturer with a long-established UK subsidiary, represented by David Honeywell, Rubi’s Commercial Director.

Worktop Masterclasses will be presented by a well-respected worktop distributor, an emerging force in porcelain worktops, and construction chemicals suppliers showing how to deliver a reliable path to successful porcelain worktop installation.