Robert Merry has spent a busy time keeping up with an ERUPTION!! of activities in the stone industry.

What a month that was! Stone is only the half of it. This town has been quiet for two years and now there’s been a ERUPTION!!! (Bob Hoskins – The Long Good Friday – great film, great moment). All of a sudden, stone coming out of my ears! That doesn’t sound right… but its spring and we can mix up our metaphors, can't we?

First the Stone Masons’ National Occupational Standards (NOS) review with the CITB. A sober affair but for the betterment of all.

Then, the Stone Federation did us chest out, strut down the road, “away the lads (and lasses)” proud at Surface Design with, in association with architect Squire & Partner, a beautifully conceived display of stone. The accompanying blurb and section on re-purposing a broken stone object was inspiring. Well done all involved.

Next up, The Case For Stone. A Stone Federation-led discussion, primarily about stone as a load bearing structural element as used at 15 Clerkenwell Close.

Hosted by Ulrike Knox of Knox architects (cathedral architect and Natural Stone Awards Judge) with Amin Taha of Group Works, Steve Webb of Webb Yates and Zac Tudor of Arup. Taha and Web had collaborated on 15 Clerkenwell Close, with its exoskeleton of French limestone. Their opinions have ruffled some British quarry feathers, although that may be a good thing in the long term. I think the tradition of using stone as a load bearing element has receded in the UK, so perhaps we can all work together to change this. Chicken and egg, I guess – to continue the poultry metaphor.

Then Stone Digital, organised by the company behind the Natural Stone Show & Hard Surfaces exhibitions and this very magazine. A two day bonanza on how the stone industry is rising to the challenge of net carbon zero and where the stone world has travelled in terms of digitalisation.

I watched excellent contributions from Albion Stone and PAYE, as well as Vetter, Historic England, Green Thinking, Simpson Brown Architects and more. If you missed it, you can watch all or any of the sessions on catch-up until the end of April on the same platform as it was originally shown on, which you can find at bit.ly/SD-on-demand.

Interestingly, as I toiled with the introduction of carbon saving machinery and methods of work, looked at digital management packages and fast tracked design solutions, increased productivity through off-site manufacture and the introduction of site robots, the stone sat there, relatively inert, looking beautiful, as always, waiting for us all to finish. Its glory undiminished by what we are trying to do with it. As ever.

Moving swiftly on, there followed a meeting of the Stone Federation Technical Committee, of which I’m a member. A goodly debate about education and skills in the sector, an aging workforce and diminishing opportunity for apprenticeships.

Of course, we discussed standards and technical stuff, too. But the education debate interested me. The Stone Masons’ NOS review, which started at the beginning of February and continued into March, reviewed 12 standards for stone people.

They cover internal/external fixing, memorials, heritage, cladding and cutting. They provide a framework that can be used in several ways: for awarding bodies to create qualifications to train individuals (for instance, in an apprenticeship framework); for employers to create job descriptions and train staff; and for individuals looking to match their skills to a trade. They underpin college courses and should be used by the industry to employ staff and train new skills. I think the framework is there, we just need to learn to use the resource we have.

The icing on my particular stone cake was the Stone Federation Interiors focus group meeting. Chaired by the recently anointed ‘el Presidente’ of the Stone Federation, Chris Kelsey – an excellent appointment, if I may say so.

There are lots of exciting developments for the Interiors group, including the soon to be published wet rooms guide, development of BS 8298 for internal use of stone cladding, and a drive to promote the use of stone in interiors.

‘When does this bloke ever find time to get any work done,’ I hear you ask. I know! As I said, it’s been a busy month.

Just going to relax in March with a trip to Future Build at Excel. I don’t think I’ll have the energy to visit KBB in Birmingham.

How about you? How’s the icing on your stone cake this spring?

www.stoneconsultants.co.uk

Bakers of Danbury, already well known in the heritage sector for the carving and stone cleaning skills of its stonemasons, as well as its wider conservation work, has created a new 18-month, externally accredited site-based Heritage Building Crafts training programme – a one of a kind.

Established more than 140 years ago, Bakers of Danbury is well established for conservation and repairs to period properties, churches and ancient monuments, including landmarks such as Westminster Abbey and St Pauls Cathedral in Lon-don.

Bakers’ has always prided itself on the training it offers, with one person who joined the company as an apprentice 35 years ago still working for the company. Many of the company’s directly employed tradespeople have been with the company for more than 20 years.

With the construction industry in general facing skills shortages, it is as important as ever that companies like Bakers, with highly skilled, directly employed staff, should pass on the knowledge of traditional construction methods to future generations, just as it has since it was founded in 1878.

Traditional methods and skills are normally conveyed through mentorship and apprenticeships within the company. With this in mind, Bakers has teamed up with the training provider Priestman Associates LLP (one of whose Directors, Mark Priestman, writes the Training column in this magazine) to develop a bespoke Heritage Building training programme – which is unique to Bakers of Danbury.

The Heritage Building Training programme will include an NVQ Level 2 in stone-masonry preservation skills, with learning and assessment based on site. There is a programme of accredited heritage building modules covering lime plastering, carpentry repairs and other skills necessary to carry out conservation and repair works to churches and ancient monuments.

On successful completion of the accredited training programme, the trainees will become qualified Heritage Building Craftsmen, with a stonemasonry NVQ Level 2 qualification and externally accredited Heritage Building Crafts training.

Trainees will benefit from a varied and valuable skill set and will continue to work on many interesting church projects, with the opportunity for subsequent training and internal promotion with Bakers of Danbury Ltd.

Peter Smyth, Managing Director of Bakers, says: “We’re proud to be actively help-ing to reduce the skills shortage within the construction industry, in particular the heritage sector, by creating two new places for Trainee Heritage Building Craftsmen, within our Church Works department.

“As there isn’t an NVQ 2 available in building heritage or conservation, our unique training programme will offer new entrants into the industry the opportunity to learn skills and benefit from training they are unlike to gain anywhere else.”

Having recently recruited one Trainee for the programme, Bakers is currently looking to fill its second vacancy. If you would like to register your interest, email info@bakersofdanbury.co.uk.

Pooil Vaaish, a dark, dense limestone from the Isle of Man is to be exported to America.

The stone from the Pooil Vaaish quarry on the Scarlett peninsula is to join the portfolio of natural stone that Burlington, the Cumbrian stone company, sells in the USA. Burlington is one of the few quarrying companies in the UK that consistently markets its stones abroad.

In a reciprocal arrangement, Pooil Vaaish becomes the sole agent for Burlington's stones, including roofing slates from Cumbria, on the Isle of Man.

The deal was reported on 14 March on the Isle of Man Today website. The report says samples of the stone have met with much interest by the American stone industry and architects in both New York and Texas. Apparently the stone is already being presented to clients.

Pooil Vaaish Managing Director Rosie Glassey is reported as saying: "I’m delighted that one of our island’s beautiful natural resources is beginning to gain great recognition internationally.

"It has long been used in palaces, cathedrals and stately homes in the UK, and we’re now excited about this expansion across the Atlantic. The international appeal of the stone really is huge."

First quarried more than 400 years ago, Pooil Vaaish stone can now be seen alongside Burlington's stone at the Pooil Vaaish showroom in Castletown on the Isle of Man and at its factory in Ballasalla.

Below: The Monument in London, where the viewing platform is Pooil Vaaish sitting on top of a column of Portland limestone.

https://pooilvaaish.com/

https://burlingtonstone.co.uk/

To commemorate the 550th anniversary of the Grant of Arms to the Worshipful Company of Masons – one of the oldest of London’s livery companies – the current Master and his wife have presented the Company with a silver statuette called ‘The Stonemason’.

It has been made by well-known silver smith and jeweller Mappin & Webb to a design produced from photographs of one of the Masons Company Yeomen, Tom Nicholls, one of the partners in London Stone Carving, a South London studio of stonecarvers who have already developed a reputation for the quality of their work that is rapidly growing.

It was King Edward IV who granted the Masons Company its arms in 1472 and the statuette to commemorate the 550th anniversary of that was unveiled by the Master, Martin Low, and presented at Lady Day Court on 22 March.

The Deputy Master, Dr Christine Rigden, formally accepted it on behalf of the Company and thanked Martin and his wife, Sue, for their generosity.

The Worshipful Company of Masons is one of the Livery Companies that still supports the trade it was established to oversee in the capital, providing help and guidance to those coming into the stone industry through its charitable trusts, which support training, among other activities. One of those it helped was Tom Nicholls.

The statuette was produced to a detailed specification developed almost a year ago to celebrate the craft of stonemasonry.

A wax model was first produced, from which a cast was made and the statuette produced. The final stage of hallmarking was carried out by the Master Mason himself at Goldsmiths’ Hall, home of another of the Livery Companies of the City of London.

www.masonslivery.org

Memorial wholesaler A&J Robertson (Granite) Ltd based in Aberdeen has appointed Bob Hutcheson as a Non-Executive Director to assist in developing a longer-term strategy for the company.

Bob’s background is accountancy and includes having been Managing Partner of the Aberdeen offices of KPMG. He has a track record of carving out innovative solutions for businesses by getting under the skin of an organisation’s issues to drive change.

Graeme Robertson, who heads the business and suffered a mild stroke last year, says Bob's appointment has a "strong element of succession planning" about it.

Robertson Granite has traded from Aberdeen for almost 150 years and is continuing to look for ways to develop and expand. It already has its own chain of memorial masons and a stake in a crematorium as well as supplying memorials to independent memorial masons and other stonework locally.

www.robertsonmemorials.co.uk

Mustapha Matib has been given a suspended prison sentence, ordered to carry out 200 hours unpaid work and pay costs of £5,673 for supervising unsafe excavation work at a site in Denton, Greater Manchester, where people were working barefoot without any kind of personal protective equipment (PPE).

The work put the people on-site in danger and rendered a neighbouring property unstable, Manchester Magistrates’ Court heard on 21 March.

The court heard how, between 2019 and 2020, Mustapha Matib had employed several groundworkers to excavate land at Gibraltar Lane, Denton, in preparation for the construction of a family home.

An inspection was carried out at the site in August 2020 after neighbours raised significant concerns. Work was stopped when serious fall risks and potential collapse of excavations were identified.

The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) found that, as principal contractor, Mustapha Matib had failed to prepare a construction phase plan, with risk assessments and method statements detailing how the work would be safely carried out, had failed to appoint a site manager with suitable skills, knowledge and experience to plan, manage and monitor the work, and had failed to ensure the health, safety, and welfare of those carrying out the work or others who may have been affected by their actions.

Inspectors also said a large, deep and unprotected excavation gave rise to the foreseeable risk of a fall. The excavations were not shored up or in any other way suitably battered back to prevent the sides collapsing.

Personal protective equipment had not been provided and some workers were working barefoot on site.

The site had not even been adequately secured to prevent unauthorised persons from entering.

A neighbouring property had been undermined, leaving parts of it at risk of collapse as a result of the excavations.

Mustapha Matib of Allerton Road, Bradford, pleaded guilty to breaching Regulations 2(1) and 3(1) of the Health & Safety at Work (etc) Act 1974. He was sentenced to 16 weeks imprisonment suspended for 12 months along with being ordered to carry out 200 hours unpaid work and pay costs of £5,673.

Speaking after the hearing, HSE inspector Phil Redman said: “Inspectors will not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement action against duty-holders who fall below the required standards and put lives at risk.”

A memorial said to be constructed of 37-tonnes of Carrara marble hand-carved in Italy at a cost of £200,000 is gaining as much publicity as the boxer it commemorates achieved during his career.

Fourteen years after a memorial to the legendary Armoy Armada motorcycle team was unveiled in a park in Armoy, Northern Ireland, by the last surviving rider, Jim Dunlop, one of the men involved in making it has returned to finish it by painting his lettering.

He is architectural & monumental mason Mark Anthony Grimley (usually known simply as Mark Anthony), who worked on the Kilkenny limestone memorial with a fellow Belfast artist, Sean Doyle. He says he decided to paint the letters because "It was time".

The Armoy Armada was formed in 1977. It consisted of four riders – Mervyn Robinson, Joey Dunlop and his brother Jim, and Frank Kennedy.

They rode together as a team for just three seasons (although the Armoy road race lives on), but in that time earned the status of legends for their fearless riding, dedication to the sport of road racing, camaraderie and skill. The team came to an end when ‘Big Frank’ Kennedy was seriously injured in 1979 at the North West 200, another Northern Irish road race.

‘Robo’ Robinson’s career and life ended when he crashed at the 1980 North West 200. He lost control at the dreaded Mather’s Cross in the Portrush Road.

The best known of the Armoy Armada was Joey ‘The Girk’ Dunlop, who went on to a record-breaking 26 TT wins. He was made an MBE in 1986 for his services to motor racing and an OBE in 1995 for his charity work.

In 2000, at the age of 48, he died in a crash in Estonia, just weeks after winning the Formula One Isle of Man TT on a Honda VTR SP-1 and going on to complete a hat-trick with wins in the 250cc and 125cc classes.

There were 50,000 mourners at his funeral, which was attended by bike riders from across Ireland and the United Kingdom. A statue of him was erected in his home town of Ballymoney in Northern Ireland.

 Mark Anthony’s life as an architectural & monumental stonemason has had its own interesting developments, which he is currently writing about as a biography. His achievements include 11 of his sculptures on permanent display in Belfast, the first from 1997. His work has also been included in exhibitions at Queens University in Belfast and Ulster Museum. His painting of the lettering on the Armoy Armada memorial brought out a local BBC reporter to feature him - not for the first time.

Mark Anthony trained in stonemasonry at Weymouth College in Dorset, cycling 20 miles to college each day from where he was staying in Salwayash, and then 20 miles back again each evening. While at Weymouth, he learnt lettercutting under the tutelage of Andrew Whittle, a celebrated lettercutter whose work includes inscriptions at Tate Britain and the Serpentine Gallery, the Animals in War monument in Park Lane, London, and at the Museum of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

Mark Anthony honed his conservation skills at Woodchester Mansion, the Victorian mansion left unfinished when the 19th century builders walked off site and never returned, unintentionally leaving behind an opportunity for training in traditional building skills in the 20th and 21st centuries.

His travels have taken him to Israel, where he worked on the conservation of stonework on the Damascus Gate, one of the main gates of the old city of Jerusalem. He worked in New Zealand, stopping off in Singapore on the way. He visited Borneo just because he wanted to see a proboscis monkey. He even lived in a cave for a while and was forced to stop working temporarily when he had both legs and his right arm broken in a collision with a car.

He married Amanda, who comes from Capetown in South Africa, after meeting her at the Natural Stone Show in London on his way back to Ireland from a trip to India.

“I’m at the age now where I’m slowing down a bit,” he says, and as well as carving public and private works and memorials, is enjoying helping others learn the benefits of working stone, as he has done with the Upper Springfield Development Trust and a project at a Poleglass estate that was opened by former Sinn Fein politician Gerry Adams.

In these projects he has worked with youth, women’s, disability, elderly and ex-prisoner groups, and school non-attenders. He likes creating art that involves the participation of others, both in its creation and its appreciation - like a public art sundial he made where the person viewing it acts as the gnomon that casts the shadow to read the time.

Mark poetically describes the quiet beat of carving and lettering stone as being like the rhythm of a beating heart, “the beat of life”, the connection between brain and hand therapeutically improving moods and easing pain, in the same way as auditory-tactile synesthesia, where an individual experiences tactile sensations in response to sound, or autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) that some experience.

“I love stone,” says Mark.

Anyone who would like to commission work from Mark or learn carving and lettering skills from him should email him on markbt15@live.co.uk or phone 02890 225458.

Below. A Janus Stone carved by Mark Anthony for art dealer Joe Brennan. It is in Joe's garden at his home in Greenisland in County Antrim. 

Enter a project in the Natural Stone Awards 2022. 

Projects entered must be in the British Isles and the construction work must have been completed within a three-year period ending 2 April 2022.

Entries must be received by 5pm on 30 April.

Enter online at www.bit.ly/AwardsEntry22

The Natural Stone Awards are presented every other year by Stone Federation Great Britain in recognition of the finest design and use of stone in construction new build and conservation, hard landscaping and interiors.

The Awards are a well established and highly prestigious scheme recognising and promoting the use of natural stone in the built environment.

For many years the Natural Stone Awards presentation ceremony has been hosted by sports commentator Jim Rosentall with voiceovers of the short-listed entries by Alan Dedicote, who has become the 'Voice of Stone'.

The Awards have been presented over the years by the great and the good who have included Prince Charles, broadcaster and former top level politician Michael Portillo, and author and business guru Digby Jones.

The winners are normally announced at a glittering ceremony in a London hotel, although the 2020 Awards were presented online only due to the Coronavirus pandemic. You can still watch them at bit.ly/SFNSA2020.

Although the online event lacked the excitement of a live, face-to-face Awards presentation, it was watched more than 1,500 times, whereas the live events are limited by the size of the venue normally to no more than 350 people. As a result, although it is anticipated this year's Awards will be presented once again in front of a live audience at London's Leonardo Royal Hotel at London Bridge, it is intended to make use of some of the lessons learnt from the 2020 Awards to put the presentation online again in order to reach as wide an audeince as possible.

The Awards give the stone industry and its clients, from developers to self-builders, architects, designers and engineers, an opportunity to showcase the wide range of uses of natural stone in contruction, emphasising its versatility, variety, sustainablility, and low maintenance longevity, stunning in its natural beauty yet eminently practical in its lifetime carbon-cutting contribution to the built environment.

Anyone involved in a project (architect, main contractor, stone contractor, stone supplier, client, building owner...) can enter the project into the Stone Awards, which this year see the introduction of two new categories: 'Domestic Landscape' and 'Ecclesiastical Interiors'. Including specific categories for these important sectors of the stone industry will open the Awards to an even wider audience.

Jane Buxey, the Stone Federation Chief Executive, says: “We are encouraging all those involved in the natural stone industry to enter their projects into the Natural Stone Awards 2022. This is a great opportunity to gain widespread recognition for your practice or company and products or services that you provide.”

How To Enter

Go to www.bit.ly/AwardsEntry22.

The Categories (click here to see the category requirements)

• New Build - Modern Style Stone Cladding: Any project that features non load-bearing natural stone cladding as covered by BS 8298.
• New Build - Traditional Style Stonemasonry: Any project that features load-bearing natural stone.
• Repair & Restoration (Commercial): Any commercial project that involves the repair and restoration of natural stone on part of a building, or the building as a whole.
• Repair & Restoration (Ecclesiastical): Any ecclesiastical project that involves the repair and restoration of natural stone on part of a building, or the building as a whole.
• Ecclesiastical Interiors: Any ecclesiastical project that uses natural stone in an interior setting.
• Interiors (Commercial & Residential): Any project that uses natural stone in an interior setting, including domestic, commercial and high-end residential.
• Landscape (Commercial/Public Realm): Any project (commercial or public realm) that involves the use of natural stone in landscaping.
• Landscape (Domestic/Private): Any domestic or private project that involves the use of natural stone in landscaping.
• Craftsmanship: Demonstrating the highest standard of stonemasonry craftsmanship.
• Carving, Lettering & Sculpture: This can be a new commission, replacement or part replacement of an original that has become disfigured or lost.