BUILDING MATERIALS

Artificial Stone

Coade Stone

Coade Stone was a kaolin-based terracotta. The Coade family created its formula in the mid-18^thC. The recipe for it has been lost. The mixture, which was fired in a kiln, is thought to have contained stone dust and ground glass. It has exceptional resistance to weathering when compared to other artificial stones.

Pulhamite

J.W. Pulham remodelled a brick kiln on the southern side of the Gunnersbury Estate. This became a Gothic tower (1861). In its construction, he used Pulhamite, an artificial stone that he had created.

Bricks

Brick-making was a malodorous business.

Staffordshire Blues

Staffordshire Blue engineering bricks are very strong. They cannot be drilled or cut. They were used for building railway viaducts. They were used to try to ensure that Broadcasting House's studios were soundproof.

Warehouses

The Museum of London Docklands is housed in the remnant of what was the largest brick building (1802) in the world at the time of its construction. It was a kilometre-long. Three-quarters of it was destroyed in the Blitz.

Yellow Bricks - Downing Street

The bricks of Downing Street are yellow. When they were restored during the 1960s. They had to be painted black.

Location: Downing Street, SW1A 2AA (orange, turquoise)

Cement

Portland Cement

In 1824 Portland cement started to be made.

Frederick Anthony White

No. 170 Queen's Gate (1889) was designed by Norman Shaw for Frederick Anthony White (1842-1933), a cement tycoon and art collector.

The property became the residence of the Rector of Imperial College.

Location: 170 Queen's Gate, SW7 5HF (blue, yellow)

See Also: TOWNHOUSES

Website: www.imperial.ac.uk/news/142029/170-queens-gate-celebrates-125-years

Clay

Belgrave Square

The wedding cake mansions of were largely built with bricks made from clay that was excavated from the square itself.

Location: Belgrave Square, SW1X 8PN (orange, red)

Clayponds

The Gunnersbury Estate had deposits of clay. These were exploited commercially, leading to the property becoming known as the Clayponds Estate. On the southern side of the land there was a kiln and a large pit where clay had been dug from.

The Rothschilds acquired the estate in 1889. They commissioned James Pulham (1820-1898) to landscape the south side of the estate. He flooded the pit to create a boating lake that was dubbed Potomac Pond. At the time, there was a ceasefire during the American Civil War. This gave rise to the popular saying in Britain All quiet on the Potomac.

Location: Clayponds Avenue, TW8 9QF

The Slough Arm

The Slough Arm (1882) of the Grand Union Canal was one of the last canals to be built in Britain. It was constructed in order that the brickfields along its course could be exploited to help the expansion of London. Once the clay was exhausted, sand and gravel was extracted and moved along the canal. Rubbish from the city was tipped into the excavated pits.

Concrete

Owen Williams's use of concrete to build Wembley Stadium (1923) was a rare use of the material in the post-1918 era. It tended to be employed in a specialist context, such as Modernist architecture. The civil engineer Raymond Sharp (1918-2013) was appointed to head the Cement & Concrete Association's technical advisory division in 1951. Thereafter, he played a leading role in persuading architects, civil engineers and builders to use the material more widely. There went on to be architects who would wax lyrical about the quality of the detailing on Hammersmith Flyover (1860).

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

Richard Owen directed the construction of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs from concrete.

Location: Crystal Palace Park, Thicket Road, SE19 2GA

Website: https://cpdinosaurs.org

Poured Concrete

Clare College Mission Church (1911) that was the first building to be constructed in Britain with poured concrete. It was designed by Sir John Simpson and Maxwell Ayrton.

Location: Dilston Grove, Southwark Park, SE16 3DD

Pre-stressed Concrete

Pre-stressed concrete had been developed in Europe before the Second World War. It required the use of less steel than frames had required previously. Following the conflict, the metal was in short supply. Francis Walley (1918-2012), a Ministry of Supply structural engineer, appreciated that if techniques related to it were patented then it would probably become far more expensive to use. Therefore, through a campaign of lectures and writing he effectively placed knowledge of it in the public domain.

Corrugated Iron

Gaussian curvature means corrugated iron sags less than a flat sheet of iron (it also explains the strength of corrugated cardboard). It was invented in 1829, an associate of Thomas Telford, to roof a dock warehouse. The material was used in the construction of St Katharine Docks. Isambard Kingdom Brunel employed it in the construction of Paddington Station and the Brompton Boilers. It was used in the California gold rush of 1849 and the subsequent Australian one.

Location: Grange Road, Bermondsey, SE1 3BE. Where corrugated iron was invented

See Also: THE THAMES Warehouses

Post-War London

Often, corrugated iron was used screen off access to sites that had been bombed aerially during the Second World War. The backgrounds in Derek Jarman's movie Jubilee (1977) reveal how much of it there still was in London in the late 1970s.

Excavation Spoil

Lord s was built with spoil from the excavation of the St John's Wood canal tunnel.

Faience

Faience is a glazed coloured earthenware. It was out of fashion as a building material for most of the 20^thC. The Regent Palace Hotel is faced with faience.

Location: The Regent Palace Hotel, 36 Glasshouse Street, W1B 5DL (pink, red)

Glass

In the late 19^thC aquariums became popular in part because of advances in glass-making.

Mosaic

Dr Antonio Salviati (1816-1890) made mosaics. He had an international reputation. He occupied Regent's House (the Apple Shop on Regent Street) put a mosaic on the building's exterior that advertised his expertise. He did the mosaics on the Albert Memorial.

Oyster Shells

Oyster shells were used by builders.

See Also: OYSTERS & SEAFOOD

Rubble

The Arnold Circus Mound

The mound in the centre of Arnold Circus was made from the rubble of buildings that had been part of The Jago.

Location: Arnold Circus, E2 7JR (red, pink)

The Cumberland Arm

The Cumberland Arm canal to Cumberland Market was filled in with the Second World War rubble.

The Harold Hill Estate

The Harold Hill Estate, Romford, was built by the London County Council after the Second World War using rubble from the Blitz.

Location: RM3 9XP

Steel

The Steel Frame Act of 1909 required both the encasement of steelwork with fire-resistant material and a certain thickness of wall.

Bon March

The Bon March department store (1877) in Brixton was the U.K.'s first steel frame building

Location: 241-251 Ferndale Road, London, SW9 8BJ

CorTen

CorTen is a steel alloy that the elements weather to a rust colour. The first domestic use of the material was by the architect John Winter (1930-2012). He designed the Cor-Ten House (1969) as a home for himself and his family. His colleagues at John Winter & Associates presented him with a plaque that read Rust In Peace.

Location: 81 Swains Lane, N6 6DT

Stone

See Also: STREET FURNITURE Paving

Bath Stone

The architect John Wood the elder acted as a salesman in London for the stone that Ralph Allen quarried in Bath.

After buying Apsley House, the 1^st Duke of Wellington had its Portland stone cladding removed. It was replaced by Bath stone, which has a dark honey colour.

Location: 149 Piccadilly, W1J 7NT (red, brown)

Portland Stone

Portland stone can be cut in any direction.

( Rabbit is a forbidden word on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. Because rabbits would emerge and run away just before a rockfall.)

Thatching

The National Society of Master Thatchers

Tiles

In 1947 the 10^th Duke of Rutland sold a major collection of tiles to the British Museum.

V For Victory

During the Second World War, when bomb-damaged roofs in East London were retiled the roofers would include a V design. The letter stood for Victory .

Timber

Stadthaus

Stadthaus is a nine-storey-tall timber building. It was designed by Cartwright Pickard Architects.

Location: 24 Murray Grove, Hackney, N1 7FB

Onker Barques

Onker barques were vessels that brought cargoes of timber from Finland and Norway. The word onker had an imitative origin. It derived from the noise that the ships winds pumps made while they were pumping water out of their holds.

Timber Merchants

Mahogany Roberts

The Windhams/Wyndhams had developed a wooded estate at Felbrigg Manor in Norfolk. In 1861 the 20-year-old Mad William Windham, who was given to outrageous conduct, married the high-class prostitute Agnes Willoughby. Her protector was Mahogany Roberts, a.k.a. Bawdyhouse Roberts, a timber merchant. Windham's uncle and guardian launched a lawsuit into the condition of the young husband's state of mind. The court ruled in William s favour finding him neither mad nor an idiot but a damned young spendthrift and fool .

David Backhouse 2024

BURGERS

See Also: FISH & CHIPS; MEAT; OYSTERS & SEAFOOD

Burger King

In 2022 Burger King's Leicester Square branch tested out an all-vegan menu.

Location: 17-21 Leicester Square, WC2H 7LE (red, grey)

Website: www.burgerking.co.uk www.burgerking.co.uk/meat-free-restaurant

McDonalds

Britain s first McDonalds was opened in 1974 by Robert Rhea, an American. He went on to establish a further 250 outlets of the chain across the country.

In 2010 McDonalds was only using the forequarters and flanks of cattle in its beefburgers.

Location: 56-58 Powis Street, Woolwich, SE18 6LQ

McLibel

David Morris and Helen Steel were environmental activists. In 1986 the pair distributed a pamphlet that was entitled McDonald s: Everything They Don t Want You To Know. The company took exception to the document s assertions. In 1990 it chose to sue the duo for libel.

The McLibel trial lasted 313 days. It became the longest suit in English legal history. In 1997 the case was concluded in the company's favour. Its victory was regarded by many as having been essentially Pyrrhic.

Upon appeal, the damages against Morris and Steel were reduced from 60,000 to 40,000. McDonald's legal bill was estimated to have been 10m.

In 2013 it was reported that one of the claims that The Guardian journalists Paul Lewis and Rob Evans had made in their book Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police was that one of the people who had participated in the authorship of the McLibel pamphlet had been Robert Lambert. He had been an undercover police officer who had posed as an environmental activist. At the time, of the volume's publication he was lecturing on terrorism studies at the University of St Andrews.

Location: The Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, WC2A 2LL (red, blue)

Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PSbg7ynGqM The rap group Public Enemy's visit to the Shepherds Bush branch. Ms Clarkson went on become a successful rapper in her own right and then a songwriter.

Location: 88-90 Uxbridge Road, W12 8LR

Wimpy Bars

Until the 1970s Wimpy Bars were how most Britons experienced eating burgers. Visiting Americans tended to be disparaging about both the business's name and the product it sold. However, these had been created in the United States. The Wimpy business had been founded in Chicago during the 1930s. The enterprise had taken its name from J. Wellington Wimpy, a character in the Popeye cartoon strip who loved eating hamburgers. Initially, Wimpy hamburgers appeared in Britain as a dish on the menu of Lyons Corner Houses. In 1954 Eddie Gold established the British Wimpy Bar in the Coventry Street J. Lyons Corner House. The following year the company opened the first standalone Wimpy Bar in London.

Location: 7-14 Coventry Street, W1D 7DH (blue, pink)

See Also: CAFES J. Lyons

Website: https://wimpy.uk.com

David Backhouse 2024