It is London’s stone of choice.
If you have been to the city you will have it etched on your memory: a golden, graceful stone which works with sunlight to create a haze of sanguine assurance in the streets of this debatably civilised centre of the Western World.
Smoke and smog layered it with grime, but it comes up a treat with sand blasting. It is Portland Stone: it made the Tower of London, the first palace of Westminster, the first stone London Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral, and the Banqueting House where Charles I was topped, amongst myriad other places.
And it was all hacked from one island. I mean, not even an island, but a tied island. A great lump of limestone jutting out of the sea off the coast of Dorset. They’ve been taking stone from that island to other places since the Romans took up residence. Archaeologists found more than 500 Roman sarcophagi under the soil on the hills outside Fortunes Well, the island’s main town. All, of course, hewn out of Portland Stone.
And the thing is, they’re still taking it out today.
Portland has a magic, but you need rose-tinted spectacles to find it. It is a working island, a business island, covered in operational quarries with huge blocks of stone piled up higgledy piggledy waiting for someone to pay £230 a cubic metre. The stone’s pricey, because it is hard enough to resist weathering, but workable enough for masons to create beautiful things with it.
To find Portland, drive along the spit of shingle from Weymouth until you hit Fortunes Well.
Named after the spring which supplied ancient communities there, Fortunes Well is Ankh Morpork-on-sea, a twisty turny village on a steep gradient they call Underhill, socio-economically at odds with the picture we all have of affluent, thatched little Dorset. Yet many of its old houses are built in Portland stone; not the worked, flat, gracious kind, but hunks taken centuries ago out of the ground and mortared together. Some of the stone is crumbling back to the sand it once was. Touch it and the first millilitres of the surface disintegrate. Clearly those stone merchants hundred of years ago were not willing to let the best stone go to the workers.
Travel south-west on the island, taking the stunning coastal paths which look down on Portland-stone cliffs, and you find the oldest building known to have been built in Portland stone: Rufus Castle, first thrown up on the cliff at Church Ope Cove in 1080, though the walls one sees today date from the fifteenth century.
Any walk passes quarries. Glance to the left and to the right, and there are the telltale blocks of stone.
Look at the houses: and you will see that wherever Portland’s wealth has gone, it has not stayed on the island. It is an anti-advert for capitalism. This island’s streets are paved with gold, yet the rich men have taken what they wanted and left.
Bits of the island pepper not just this country but countries far afield . The UN building in New York is made of the island of Portland. But the money made by gargantuan transactions such as this is not evident there.
It is a working island. A no-nonsense depository of some of the most magical, golden stone the world has ever known.
Kate Shrewsday 
Portland always makes me think of the Bill which has pecked into so many hulls.
It does seem a shame that the inhabitants have not grown rich on their wonderful product.
A stone-ishingly interesting!
😀 Glad you found it so, Col. Compelling place.
Thank goodness they built with stone. Think of the history you’d have lost by now if it had all been wood.
Indeed, PT: Woodhenge has not half the attention Stonehenge has had…https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/woodhenge/
Rock solid post, Kate! Enjoyed wandering round with you.
Thanks Nancy 🙂
I was completely unaware of this stone until this post Kate. Is it a limestone? I’m wondering if any of our vendors at The Grind carry it or something comparable.
It is indeed limestone. I feel sure it must be readily available…I’d be interested to know whether it still travels as far as NY!
My company carries stone that’s internationally sourced such as bluestone from Belgium, marble from Italy, Turkey and China. We used to sell custom made washstands made from MoMA stone, when our owner was able to get his mitts on the stone that Philip Johnson used in MoMA’s sculpture garden when it underwent a renovation some years back, but I think we’ve sold most of that material. Where our vendors source their limestone is a question I’ll have to run by my boss. If it does hail from the UK (and this material is brought overseas all the time by container) it’s not mentioned in the name of the stone. Or it does not jump out at me i.e., we don’t carry any stone that mentions London in its name. We have stone from the middle east called biblical stone or Jerusalem stone. But our limestones could be sourced in the UK. As I’ve said we carry stone from all over the world.
How fitting, I think, that Portland Stone was transported from one island to another to build the physical structure of the UN. Very interesting and well wrought post, Kate.j
The children are growing so tall.
They are. We have entered the teenage portal. It is a brave new world, Penny.
It’s amazing that such a simple building material can command such a high price.
It is, Rob. But it looks so amazing when it is finished – just golden – I can understand how it might become very valuable.
Someday, Kate! Someday I shall see it for myself. 🙂
Thanks, I don’t know why, but I’d never given Portland Stone much of a thought before today. How much stone do they quarry in a year do you think? Or is it now just for prestige projects?
I’m still trying to find out, MTAC; they seem to show no sign of stopping their extraction.
Seems bizarre to make it common- especially in this day and age 🙂
Hi Kate coming from London and spending many holidays with my parents in Dorset I would appreciate it if you gave me permission to reproduce this post on my own blog:
http://www.cabbieblog.com
I would, of course, give full credit and links.
Thanks in anticipation.
Hi David, you are most welcome to reproduce it. All the best, Kate
Published today many thanks:
http://www.cabbieblog.com/the-stone-which-built-london/
A fascinating post.