City of London donates demolished stone doorframe to Dorset stone park
Part of a demolished Fleet Street office is getting an unusual second life as the entrance gateway to a stone sculpture park in Dorset.
To make way for the Salisbury Square Development, the offices at 81 Fleet Street had to be demolished, but important parts, including the Portland Stone entrance door frame, were salvaged during the demolition.
Looking for a use for the doorframe, the City of London decided to donate it to a Dorset-based stone sculpture park to be reused as a free-standing gateway entrance into their park. The sculpture park sits inside a 42-acre quarry that had been worked commercially for around 350 years until 1982 when the Portland Sculpture and Quarry Trust (PSQT) established the Sculpture Park.
Over 60 art interventions are carved into the living rockface within the park, extracted boulders, or worked from the landscape itself. Two islands of unquarried rock are where you can see work by Antony Gormley and other well-known artists in relation to the natural rock layers of the Jurassic age, which make up Portland and Purbeck limestone.
The park had wanted to create some form of gateway entrance into the outdoor gallery for some time when the City of London indicated it was willing to donate the Portland stone doorframe to them. They said that returning the doorframe to the quarry from which the stones were carved would also reference and celebrate the masonry skills utilised a century ago in the quarry.
The ornate architrave on the Fleet Street doorframe is also significant for the quarry as it shows the original level of whitbed (since quarried away) and a view through to the original rockface of unquarried stone. When installed, the view through the archway will frame the quarry railroad tunnel, which links to the wider Quarry Park and the Portland Coastal Path.
Dorset Council has now granted planning permission, and once it has been installed in the sculpture park, you will be able to visit Dorset and walk through a London office doorway.
A City of London Corporation spokesperson said: “Our Members approved the decision to reuse and donate the Portland Stone door surround. Donating the stone door surround strengthens the project’s Culture Plan, the Circular Economy and reduced carbon cost. It was important to us to make such a donation.”
Related to reusing the stone doorframe, the granite facade at Fleetbank House (Cornish in origin) has been recovered. These granite panels will be cut into strips and laid end on end to form a grid in the paved areas of the new Salisbury Square Development. Apart from saving the cost and environmental impact of removing the stone, this will help retain some of the site’s heritage in the new development.
A great story, although actually moving bits of buildings from London to Dorset isn’t that unusual. There are several buildings and sculptures in Swanage that started life in London.
The reason being that, in the 19th century, London was importing large quantities of Purbeck stone from Swanage by ship, and the ships needed ballast for the return journey. Using stone from the older buildings being replaced meant that was not an entirely profitless journey.
Perhaps a future IanVisits article there, or have you already done it?.
And Swanage also has many City of London cast iron bollards for the same reason.
On Swanage, there’s two publications:
1. “Curiosities of Swanage, or Old London by the sea”, 1971,32 pages, paperback, by David Lewer and J Bernard Calkin
2. “£The Bollard Story, How London Street Posts came to Swanage”, circa 1976 , a small (less than A5 size)paperback by Sidney Tringham.
Brilliant article !- The arch will provide a Gateway for the handing on of skills and knowledge as part of the Memory Stones – Green Corridor project; creating parallel walks in London and Portland that bring together the Island’s quarrying history and architecture of the City and legacy for the future