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Quantifying the History of Building Stone Use in a Heritage City: Cambridge, UK, 1040–2020

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Abstract

Building stone use through time in Cambridge is reassessed based on a new field survey of most significant buildings within the city boundary. Included in the survey is stone external to buildings, as walling or dressings, but omitting paving and most roofing. Stone provenance is identified to a quarry or quarry group where possible. Stone location is specified by grid reference and as a named component of each building. The date of each building project is extracted from documentary evidence if available. The volume of stone used in each project is estimated from whether it forms walls or dressings or both, and over what proportion of the host building. Assigning stone types to a single quarry, mostly in a laterally and vertically heterogeneous shallow-marine Jurassic carbonate sequence, involves the use of ‘type locations’—buildings with documented evidence of stone source and construction date. Field-scale identification criteria are essential to complement museum reference samples and microscopic petrography. The new database of stone and brick includes over 1300 records, about three times more than compiled from previous studies. This semi-quantitative approach to stone use yields pie charts of relative volumes of stone types, scatter plots of first use of each quarry’s stone against its distance from Cambridge, and histograms of the volume of each stone type through time. These results inform discussion of geological, locational, and societal influences on the sequence of stone use. The methodology used in the Cambridge study should prove useful in other heritage towns and cities.

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Availability of Data and Materials

The Excel workbook of data has been deposited with the UK National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC),deposit reference B711AC476C672A32E0539594ABC0506C.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Matt Riley and the Sedgwick Museum for access to the Watson Collection samples and to Tim Palmer and Douglas Palmer for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. Nigel Woodcock thanks the late Colin Forbes and the late Bill Black for stimulating his interest in Cambridge stone.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EQ, UK

    Nigel H. Woodcock & Euan N. Furness

  2. Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet DTP and Department of Earth Science & Engineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK

    Euan N. Furness

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  1. Nigel H. Woodcock
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  2. Euan N. Furness
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Correspondence to Nigel H. Woodcock.

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Woodcock, N.H., Furness, E.N. Quantifying the History of Building Stone Use in a Heritage City: Cambridge, UK, 1040–2020. Geoheritage 13, 12 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12371-021-00536-0

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