Building London – what London is made from and where it came from!

Kit Hill is a magnificent granite plug hill in east Cornwall, north of Saltash and close to the Tamar Valley. It’s a ‘Marilyn’ [ see below ] that rises steeply up out of the rolling east Cornish countryside. And like so many of the Cornish granites it too played an important role in building London.…

Of course the Cornish granite destined for London had to be got there somehow. It would be put on tramways, or simply on horse drawn carts but ultimately it need to end up at a railway siding or wharf to be transported to London. I’ve posted about Lamorna before [ https://buildinglondon.blog/2021/08/11/4-lamorna-or-lands-end-granite/ ] a small dock…

Some of the oldest walls in London are so called ‘rubble walls’, so not neat ‘dimension stone’ or ‘ashlar’ blocks which fit together so neatly like the Portland Stone that so many buildings in Westminster were built or faced with after the Great Fire of London, nor all the various styles of brick walls. The…

Luxulyan granite, from near St Austell also plays a prominent role in building London. Ussher et al. (1909) report that “The granite of St Austell has been used in public buildings in Oxford, London and Rome.  London Bridge [the one now at Lake Tavasu, Arizona], the British Museum, and Crystal Palace were constructed partly of…

Kennall Vale, just outside Ponsanooth, north of Penryn, has another Carnmenellis granite quarry said to have supplied granite to the Embankment. [1] It’s unclear though as it’s also said the quarry is “early 20th century granite quarry” [2] And the quarry is not on the 1908 map. It’s possible that Kennall Vale supplied granite for…

Another quarry famous for it’s supply of granite used for building London is the Cheesewring Quarry on the south-eastern edge of Bodmin Moor, 1.5 kilometres north of the village of Minions. Adrian Spalding noted “The quarry worked the silver-grey granite of Stowe’s Hill, cutting deep into the hillside but stopping short of the famous Cheesewring…

While exploring the Carnmenellis granite quarries I was told of a lost, overgrown, inaccessible group of stones, that like the Swelltor stones, were bound for London, but never made it, and have stood stacked, gradually getting lost in the Cornish rainforest! This was irresistible and so I made it my object to find them. I…

The granites of the South-West come from a number of areas of igneous activity from 100s of millions of years ago that produced large areas of granites called plutons. Humans long ago discovered the use of this granite for building, originally using ‘moorstone’ but increasingly through quarrying. The area with the most mines was the…

Lamorna or Lands End granite comes from 3 quarries past Penzance in Cornwall, a few miles before the Lands End and on the ‘Land’s End pluton’ or igneous intrusion that gave rise to granite. It is classified, apparently as a ” … typical Cornubian abundantly megacrystic biotite granite.” [ 1 ] Ruth Siddel states ”…

When John Rennie’s London Bridge of 1831 was famously sold to an American in the late 1960s to be later rebuilt at Lake Tavasu in Arizona, not all the bridge made the journey back to Devon whence it had come, then across the world to Arizona. Some of the bridge still stands on the south…

Foggintor Quarry is a sister quarry to Swelltor [ see previous blog post ] . The meaning of Foggintor is unclear but it seems unlikely it would not refer to the dreadful fogs that descend on Dartmoor even in the height of summer. So beware! [1] Foggintor seems to have been opened in the late…

High up on Dartmoor, very beautiful in summer and very bleak in winter, no more than I mile from the grim Dartmoor Prison, lies a group of large granite stones that once upon a time were destined for London. These blocks of granite, corbels, [ stone struts ] cut in the early 1900s were destined…

Hi! My name is Glyn Harries and this last couple of years I’ve developed a keen interest in what London is, and was, made from, the bricks, the stones, the wood, the concrete and artificial stone, the metal and all the rest, and more so, where it, or they, all came from. So the brickpits…