More British Stone Than Ever at the Natural Stone Show
There is nothing more appropriate for building and hard landscaping than indigenous natural stone, especially in those areas of the country where the stone helps define the architecture and create the sense of place.
The Natural Stone Show enables you to see major British stone suppliers all together at one time.
Nowhere does stone make more of a statement than in London, and the stone making the statement is Portland limestone. From St Paul's Cathedral and the Mansion House built after the Great Fire of 1666 to the new, award-winning St. James Market and Chelsea Barracks, Portland limestone adds its signature to the landmarks of England's capital.
The beds of Portland stone – the whitbed, the basebed, the roach – are familiar enough, but at the Natural Stone Show, Albion Stone, the champion of Portland stone, introduces another bed, Ostrea Patch Reef Whitbed.
Patch reefs were a feature of the seas in which the sediments that became Portland limestone were originally deposited. Every now and again one manifests itself among the Portland beds being extracted today and the stone is extracted and sold at a premium to the most discerning of customers – because once it is used up it could be many years before another patch reef is discovered.
Another signature stone is Purbeck, also from the Jurassic Coast of England. The many distinct beds of figurative stone are durable and hard wearing, and because they are available in complementary beds lend themselves ideally to decoratively patterned floors using a mixture of those beds.
Purbeck is just one of the stone ranges that will be shown by Lovell Stone Group. It extracts the stone from several quarries, enabling it to offer the full range of beds and making the company the largest supplier of Purbeck stone in the UK.
But alongside the Purbeck, Lovell Stone Group will be exhibiting stones from its various quarries, each producing unique beds of stone suitable for a building, architectural masonry, flooring, paving, monumental and landscaping. The stone is the Group's Chilmark and Chicksgrove limestones, its Somerset blue and white lias, its Hurdcott Green sandstone from Wiltshire and, above all, perhaps, its premium Hartham Park Bath Stone.