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

One of my absolute favourite London building material is the shiny blue glazed Scoria Brick of Teeside seen above at Stepney Green. Scoria bricks are a by-product of the Teeside iron industry and are not clay based like most other bricks. Iron makers were looking for a use for the waste scum or slag from […]

Upper Watergate Street connected, and still connects Deptford, the High Street and St Pauls Church, down the King’s Stairs, with the River Thames, once it’s key highway into London and out to the rest of the world. And I think it has the oldest paving anywhere in London, or at least the most unique! The […]

While searching in The City recently for the site of the hall of Gerard the Giant, see previous post, I noticed a small park the other side of Queen Victoria Street.I investigated, found it to be Cleary Park, noticed that the top of it was apparently right above the Circle Line, behind a big wall, […]

I love this! A beautiful circle of history from Deep Time through an early medieval hall in the City of London and Gerard, its attendant giant, and back to the dinosaurs of in Crystal Palace! Our tale starts in the swamps of the Bathonian Age [1] in the middle of the Jurassic Period, in the […]

Tucked between the two Leas in Hackney, the old river Lea the Saxons and Danes fought over [1], the boundary between Danelaw and Saxon Mercia [2], and the 18thC canalised River Lee Navigation, just south of Lea Bridge in the Middlesex Filter Beds Nature Reserve, stands an unusual granite sculpture called Nature’s Throne, surrounded by […]

While I love the stone that has been used to build London, from the Cornish granite to the Collyweston slate, really it is brick that built London. The vast majority of houses built in the 17th to 19thC in London were built from the brickearth and the clay that lies at or near the surface […]

Quarries often have great views being dug into and out of the sides of hills. But even with that the Trefor granite quarry cut into the side of Garn Fôr aka Mynydd y Gwaith [mountain of ‘the works’], one of the 3 peaks of Y Eifl on Pen Llŷn, has extraordinary views! [1] The main […]

Just into Devon, coming from London, on the south coast, is the small seaside town of Beer. Building stone has been quarried below and above ground here since Roman times. And it makes a few appearances in building London. Like Totternhoe [ see previous post ] it’s a chalk, this time a bit younger and […]

We all know chalk in one way or other. For me it was sticks of it exploding on the wall behind me and a teacher screaming “Pay attention Harries!!!”. For others maybe just something they played with when young or what we use to write on pavements and walls. And we know then that we […]

The first posts on this blog have been about granite, and granite is indeed the dominant feature of building along the Thames through central London. But London more generally is about brick and I’ll focus a lot on that in posts to come. And to start, yesterday, I checked out the 16thC bricks/brickwork of the […]