the Stone Mason a History of Building Britain

Over the past three decades, Ziminski has worked on many of Britain's greatest buildings and monuments, from the Roman ruins at Bath to Salisbury Cathedral's spire to St. Paul's and they have given him an unusual perspective on the warp and weft of English history, nature and geology. As a youngster, he was drawn to rickety buildings and into the puzzle of how one medieval building was still standing. 'Who built them? How long did it take to put their frames up? Where did the oak come from? Where had they sourced the stone? How was all this heavy stuff brought here on what I had been taught were the terrible roads only used by armies and royalty?' His father's big hands still carried the scars of stone cutting as he told his son about how gelignite must be handled in the tunnelling process. Blasted stone he said was no good for building with, as the explosion would microfracture the stone so it needed to be extracted by hand. Andrew began to notice the different limestones from the isles of Portland and Purbeck, and different walls of red brick, green sandstone, flint and chalk block as he began to understand the foundations of architecture. he laid out his own oddly named tools - the frig bob, cocks comb and French drag, and dreamed about how his working life might have progressed in medieval times through the stages of apprentice, journeyman and then master. Stone fixer masons need strength subtlety and an engineer's mindset as they have to lift and fix newly carved blocks sometimes weighing thousands of pounds into a pre-cut pocket with only a cigarette paper's width to spare. He shows the strange mason's marks and superstitious graffiti carved into the walls of a priory's northern transept give it all a very human touch. From the first stone megaliths put up by neolithic farmers to Roman temples, the Anglo Saxon and Norman churches, as well as the engine houses, mills and aqueducts of the Industrial Revolution, each gives us a different view of our past. This is a very personal history of how Britain was built, from the inside out, fascinating and idiosyncratic and conjuring up a disappeared English world.
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Author: Andrew Ziminski 

Publisher: John Murray

Released Date: 2021

ISBN: 9781473663947