Practical Masonry
Donhead Publishing has added to their library of classic building texts with this reprint of William Purchase’s Practical Masonry. This edition rectifies some compromises of the Attic Books reprint of the 1980s: the text is restored to its full size, making the rather severe typeface and plates much easier on the eye, and is enclosed in a library-quality binding and hard cover. Both versions reproduce the 1904 edition rather than the less elaborate first edition of 1896, but Donhead has gone further by restoring chapters omitted from the Attic edition on estimating and building stones, on the wise basis that one can never assume what information is obsolete.
It’s hugely cheering to see Donhead patiently rescuing for a new generation the texts we hunted down in second-hand bookshops as students in the early 80s, swapping photocopies like cherished conkers: Warland with the original fold-out plans, the first edition of McKay, with Nichols and Keep’s crystal-clear Geometry of Construction in the pipeline. If they can collect Jaggard and Drury (I still refer back to my father’s copy like a family bible), and an early version of Mitchell’s, they can call the job done.
Owners of Warland may ask what they would gain from a second text. Both cover setting-out comprehensively, Warland being biased towards the classical detail prevalent in the commercial buildings of his time. His ‘modern’ masonry refers to a generation of curious hybrid structures: massive work of exquisite quality, much of it machined, was effectively a cladding for steel frames whose awesome strength was itself required by the weight of the cladding, with the latent risk of entombed rust. (A tutor of mine who had repaired Edwardian stone corbels in Lower Regent Street claimed that for ever after he would only feel safe there in the middle of the road.) Warland’s depiction of this technology is essential for anyone repairing it. As a structural engineer he says less on tool skills, but has exemplary coverage of the sequences of stone removal.
Purchase’s book could have been written a century earlier, taking no note of the new methods coming in even as he wrote, but is more timeless for that. He takes the reader from descriptions of basic tools through to setting-out of vaults, tracery, and circle-on-circle work, expounding in detail the subjects still covered by the City and Guilds syllabus of thirty years ago. All masonry in the book is loadbearing. He includes some sketch pages of Gothic and classical mouldings whose layout possibly inspired Banister Fletcher.
Purchase aims his book, with its 90 pages of setting-out geometry, at ‘young beginners in the craft’: a sobering reflection on our day, where ever-diluted syllabuses compensate with ever-inflated assessment paperwork. In the 1912 Grade I exam just one question (of 12) asks for six sketches each of Roman and thirteenth-century mouldings, another for the weights and crushing strengths of eight named stones: today a whole workbook is needed to record the refacing of a single block probably laid originally by an illiterate. At the top of the hierarchy, when prestigious practices design stone buildings they need advice from outsiders to do so successfully. Even a craft-sympathetic speaker from SPAB can innocently say that for some intricate site procedure ‘the operative needs close supervision’. I don’t think William Morris would have tried to supervise Mr Purchase.
I could say, Read this marvellous book and weep. Instead, read it and learn, architects as well as tradespeople, and fight back against the erosion of skills. With the right skills, everything is still possible, for new work, as well as repair.
Martin Duncan-Jones
A self-employed stonemason engaged mostly in church repair and remodelling for the last 25 years.
