We are all very excited in our lab to have had two posters and a presentation accepted for the 15th International Congress on the Deterioration and Conservation of Stone. We will be presenting on our bioreceptivity work and asking people to join our efforts to produce an international database of stone bioreceptivity. We will also be showing how bioreceptivity testing can be used to help characterise the effects biocides and conservation treatments on stone.
Chimera of at Notre Dame de Paris by Jawed Karim, Wikimedia Commons
If you are coming to Stone 2025 please come and say hello to save us from standing by our poster like this!
Exciting news, following the changes requested by the reviewers Heritage Journal has accepted our paper ‘Measuring primary and secondary bioreceptivity of stone and implications for heritage conservation’. We have made sure that it will be open access so will post again when it is published!
Following lab testing on the alternate biocides we are moving on to field trials. We have 3 paving stone sized slabs which will be used to test how well the biocides work in the real world, but before that they need cleaning so the lab is full of large stone slabs are we carefully remove as much biological growth from the surfaces with purified water.
We’ve completed the pilot phase for our study! In this phase we looked at all the different methods of testing stone bioreceptivity in the literature.
We then selected one to take forwards for looking at different stone types and with a few tweaks to the methodology we have a protocol which will work for most types of stone used in the heritage field. Next step is to start looking at adapting this methodology to give us a lab based test for biocides which will show whether they change the bioreceptivity of the surfaces, oh and get the pilot phase written up and published!
As we mentioned in our launch post for the Historic England project we are looking at three heritage stones, here’s a little background on them…
Foggintor Granite
Foggintor quarry, originally known as Royal Oak quarry, is located near Princetown on Dartmoor (UK), the quarry is now closed but the stone is still available from stock. The granite is a biotite-bearing syeno-granite pegmatite with crystal colours primarily ranging from medium light grey to greyish black . Stone from this quarry was used in the main column of Nelson’s column as well as many other notable London buildings.
Howley Park Sandstone
Howley Park sandstone is still quarried near Leeds (UK), it’s a brownish coloured dolomitic sublithic wacke-stone. This stone has been used in heritage sites such as the Coliseum Theatre in Leeds and Wentworth House in South Yorkshire.
Jordans Basebed Portland Limestone
Jordans Basebed limestone originates from the Isle of Portland (UK). It’s an oolitic limestone containing small fossil shell fragments with a creamy white colour which is typical of Portland limestones. Portland limestones were widely used by Christopher Wren in the rebuilding of London following the Great Fire in 1666, it is also the stone of choice for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for headstones and so can be found globally.
