About this Project

About this project

London Pavement Geology is a public record of the building stones under your feet. It began in central London and now covers the rest of Britain too: more than 4,300 stone records at some 2,800 buildings and sites — kerbs, columns, cathedral steps, shop fronts, cemetery monuments — each recorded with the stone it is made from and where that stone came from.

It is free to use, and anyone can add a site they have spotted.

The people behind it

Founder

Dave Wallis

Dave read geology at the end of the 1960s and spent his career in oil and gas, only the first few years of it directly geological. He started this project to help geologists of every kind — students of all ages, professionals and amateurs — enjoy the rock types, fossils and structures that are there to be seen on the buildings and pavements around them.

He built it as a way of giving something back to the geological community, and has recorded a great many of the sites here himself. He welcomes comments and ideas from anyone who shares that aim.

Building stone identification and fieldwork

Ruth Siddall

Ruth is a geologist and writer whose work connects the earth sciences with art and heritage. A research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, she studies the pigments, ceramics and building materials used in art and architecture.

Most of the sites in this collection were visited, recorded and photographed by Ruth, and the identifications are largely hers. She also writes and leads urban geology walks around Britain and further afield.

About the data

Most of the building stone data here was compiled by Ruth Siddall, who takes responsibility for those identifications and for any mistakes or inaccuracies in them. Dave Wallis has recorded many of the sites, and others have been submitted by members of the public — those are ground-truthed and approved before they appear.

Although there are many varieties of rock on our planet, no two are the same and a restricted number are worked for dimension and decorative stone. Many stones are instantly recognisable with a little experience; Portland stone, the varieties of Norwegian larvikite, Finnish Baltic Brown and Aberdeenshire’s Peterhead granite spring to mind. However the identification of less common building stones relies on experience, scientific, archaeological and architectural research and connoisseurship. It is not infallible and there is always the opportunity to learn more. The identifications given on this website are supported by a high degree of confidence.

For some buildings, information on the stones used has been gleaned from various published sources, which are all listed in the Further Reading section of this website. Ruth is also grateful for information supplied to herself and to Eric Robinson by architects and stone contractors for many late 20th and 21st century buildings. Some of this can be found on the relevant firms’ websites, and some was supplied through personal correspondence. Building stone collections, in museums and online, are essential in identifying unfamiliar stones. There are good databases of UK and European stones and quarries, but it is much harder to identify more exotic stones from places such as Brazil, South Africa, China and many other corners of the globe; industry databases often give only trade names and broad provenances, and the data needs to be authenticated against the academic literature and geological maps.

The structure of this website keeps the data simple, so it does not allow for a thorough discussion of the range of possibilities behind a particular identification. Sometimes the most likely name and origin is given, or a generic term such as ‘Cornish granite’. If you want to know more about a stone, and the reasons for a particular identification on a specific building, contact Ruth through this website and she will send you the detail and the reference list.

Please do contact us if you spot a mistake and we will do our best to check it out and correct it.