British stonemasonry by the numbers
Stone Federation Great Britain publishes its member list. Every member gets a page with an address, contact details, a set of specialities they have ticked, and the stone types they say they work with.
Read one at a time, it is a contact directory. Read all 214 at once, it is the closest thing there is to a public dataset describing the shape of the British stone trade: what these firms do, what they say they do, and where they are.
Nobody appears to have analysed it as a whole, so we did. Everything below comes from a capture of the full member list taken on 14 August 2026, cross-referenced against postcode data. The last section sets out exactly how it was done and where our numbers could be wrong.
found.rocks is not affiliated with Stone Federation Great Britain. We use its published member list, alongside the Ethical Stone Register, as one of the sources behind the Verified badge on directory listings.
The single most important caveat, stated first
Both of the interesting fields, specialities and stone types, are self-declared on a tick-box form, and members are generous with the boxes.
There are 35 specialities to choose from. The median member ticks 11 of them. One member ticks 30. Of the 189 members who answer the stone-type question, 131 of them (69.3%) simply tick “All Types”.
So this is not an audit of what 214 firms do. It is a survey of how the British stone trade describes itself, which is a different and in some ways more revealing thing. Where a number below could mislead on its own, we have printed it next to what it is a share of.
Finding 1: British stonemasonry is a repair trade
This is the clearest signal in the data, and it is not close.
| What members claim | Firms | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Restoration | 122 | 57.0% |
| New build | 109 | 50.9% |
| Conservation | 102 | 47.7% |
| Cleaning and surface repairs | 97 | 45.3% |
| Ecclesiastical | 85 | 39.7% |
Take the four repair specialities together, counting each firm once however many it ticks:
- 136 members (63.6%) claim at least one repair speciality.
- 109 (50.9%) claim new build.
- 92 (43.0%) claim both.
- 44 members (20.6%) do repair and never new build.
- Only 17 members (7.9%) do new build and never touch repair.
Read those last two lines together. A member that works only on new buildings is rare, roughly one in thirteen. A member that works only on old ones is nearly three times as common. For most of the membership, new build is something a repair business also does, rather than a separate industry with its own firms.
The ecclesiastical number deserves its own sentence. Almost 40% of the Stone Federation membership works on churches. It is the only building type the form asks about at all, and two members in five tick it, which tells you something about where the work has been for the last century.
That reframes what the trade actually is. Britain built in stone for centuries and largely stopped; what is left is a large and specialised repair economy maintaining that inheritance, with a comparatively small new-build tail. It also explains why so many members list conservation-adjacent skills that a purely commercial contractor would never carry: 86 firms offer carving, plaques and statues, 61 offer memorials, and 55 offer lettercutting by hand.
Finding 2: More than a quarter of members are not stonemasons
Stone Federation Great Britain is a trade federation for the stone industry, and a stone industry needs adhesive manufacturers, testing houses and consulting engineers as much as it needs masons. There is nothing improper about any of this. But it matters for anyone reading “Stone Federation member” as a shorthand for “stonemason”, because it is not one.
Sorting members by whether they claim any speciality that involves working, quarrying or selling stone:
| Firms | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Claim a core stone speciality | 155 | 72.4% |
| Tick specialities, none of them core | 44 | 20.6% |
| Tick nothing at all | 15 | 7.0% |
59 of 214 members (27.6%) do not, on their own listing, claim to work stone.
The 44 in the middle row are a recognisable cast. Adhesive, mortar and sealant manufacturers: Ardex, Mapei, Instarmac, Building Adhesives, Schlüter-Systems. Cleaning and surface-care chemistry: Lithofin, Fila. Consulting engineers and facade specialists: Arup, FMDC, RSK, IBIS, Harrison Goldman. Testing and research: BRE, the Scottish Lime Centre Trust. Institutions: the National Stone Centre, the Natural History Museum. And the Natural Stone Institute, the American trade body, which is a member of the British one.
The 15 who tick nothing are a different problem, and a more interesting one. They are not non-stone firms. They include Marshalls and The Stonemasonry Company, both unambiguously stone businesses, along with Celtic Stone and Conservation, Anthemion Restoration and Nikolaus Bagnara. They simply left the specialities field blank. On a tick-box directory, an empty field is indistinguishable from an absent business, which is a good argument for never using one field as your only filter.
What this means if you are hiring
Stone Federation membership is a genuine signal. It is a paid membership of the trade’s own body, it is published openly, and the Ethical Stone Register sits on top of it. It is worth asking about, and it is why we treat it as one of the two sources behind our own Verified badge.
What it is not is a description of what a company does. Roughly one member in four is in the industry without being a mason, and the list gives no visual distinction between a stonemason, a sealant manufacturer and a firm of consulting engineers. Ask what the firm does, and ask for the last three jobs like yours.
Finding 3: The trade is registered in London. The stone is not.
Of the 163 members whose postcode resolves to a place:
| Region | Members | Share |
|---|---|---|
| London | 37 | 22.7% |
| South East | 22 | 13.5% |
| East of England | 19 | 11.7% |
| East Midlands | 17 | 10.4% |
| North West | 16 | 9.8% |
| South West | 15 | 9.2% |
| Scotland | 10 | 6.1% |
| Wales | 8 | 4.9% |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | 8 | 4.9% |
| West Midlands | 5 | 3.1% |
| North East | 2 | 1.2% |
| Northern Ireland | 2 | 1.2% |
| Channel Islands | 2 | 1.2% |
Over a third of the membership is registered in London and the South East. Yorkshire and the Humber, whose sandstone quarries paved a great deal of Victorian Britain and still supply Yorkstone today, has 8 members. The North East has one.
Now filter to the 32 members who say they operate a quarry. Of the 21 whose postcode resolves, the ranking inverts:
| Region | Quarry operators |
|---|---|
| South West | 5 |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | 4 |
| South East | 3 |
| Scotland | 3 |
| London, North West, Wales, Northern Ireland, East Midlands, Channel Islands | 1 each |
That is a map of British geology rather than British commerce.
Four of the South West five sit on the Jurassic limestone belt: Bath Stone Group and Park Lane Bathstone on Bath stone, Haysom Purbeck Stone and Lovell Stone Group on Purbeck. The fifth, Forest of Dean Stone Firms, works Forest of Dean sandstone instead. The Yorkshire four are the Pennine sandstones that produce Yorkstone, among them Johnsons Wellfield at Crosland Hill and Grahams Quarries at Hillhouse Edge, both in Kirklees. Scotland’s three are Tradstocks in Stirling, Denfind in Angus and Hutton Stone in the Borders.
The South East’s three show how much a regional label can hide. Two of them, Cotswold Natural Stone and Johnston Quarry Group, work Cotswold stone in west Oxfordshire, which the statistical regions place in the South East and no stonemason would.
A caution on all geography here. The address a member gives is a registered office, and for quarry companies that is often not the quarry. Albion Stone appears in Surrey; it mines Portland stone in Dorset. Britannicus Stone is the single London “quarry operator” and is registered in Kensington; the British marbles it supplies come out of the ground in Scotland, Yorkshire and Wales. Read the table as where the paperwork lives, not where the work happens. It is also why our own directory places Albion Stone in Dorset rather than where its postcode says.
Finding 4: The stone-type field cannot answer the question everybody asks
“Which stones does this firm work with?” is the most useful question a stone directory could answer, and this one mostly does not.
Of 189 members who answer at all, 131 (69.3%) tick “All Types”. That leaves 58 who name specific stones:
| Stone | Firms naming it | Share of the 58 |
|---|---|---|
| Limestone | 48 | 82.8% |
| Sandstone | 42 | 72.4% |
| Granite | 19 | 32.8% |
| Slate | 17 | 29.3% |
| Marble | 13 | 22.4% |
| Other stone | 13 | 22.4% |
Among firms willing to be specific, limestone and sandstone dominate, and both lead granite and marble by a factor of two or more. That is Britain’s own geology answering: the building-stone belt is limestone through Dorset, the Cotswolds and Lincolnshire, and sandstone through Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales. Granite and marble are imports or edge cases by comparison, Cornish and Aberdeen granite notwithstanding.
The honest reading of the 69.3%, though, is that a tick box offering “All Types” will be ticked. It costs nothing to claim everything, and on a membership directory there is no reason not to. This is precisely why found.rocks does not populate its own stone associations from trade-body data: we read what a firm says about itself on its own website and record the evidence, which is why the Stone Library can tell you that Yorkstone has 15 named suppliers rather than that 131 firms work “all types”.
Finding 5: Stone Federation Great Britain is not entirely British
Twelve members give an address in another country:
| Country | Members |
|---|---|
| Ireland | 4 |
| Portugal | 3 |
| Germany | 2 |
| Italy | 2 |
| United States | 1 |
Two more are in the Channel Islands, which are not part of the United Kingdom. A thirteenth, the German firm Geiger Group, has an address truncated before its country and so is not counted above.
The Portuguese and Italian members are quarry and processing groups selling into the British market: ALS Stones, LSI Stone and Solancis from Portugal, Margraf and Nikolaus Bagnara from Italy. The Irish four include two of the better-known quarry operators on the island, McKeon Stone and McMonagle Stone. The American member is the Natural Stone Institute, which is the body found.rocks uses to verify listings in the United States.
For a buyer this is a small but real point about provenance: a supplier can be a Stone Federation Great Britain member and supply stone that has never been within a thousand miles of Britain. If British stone specifically is what you want, the membership badge does not tell you that, and you need to ask where the stone was quarried. The Ethical Stone Register is the mechanism built for the related question of how it was quarried.
The full speciality table
Every speciality offered by the Stone Federation directory, ranked by how many of the 214 members claim it. This is the citable version of the dataset.
| Speciality | Members | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Stone works / masonry | 130 | 60.7% |
| Flooring | 125 | 58.4% |
| Cladding | 123 | 57.5% |
| Restoration | 122 | 57.0% |
| New build | 109 | 50.9% |
| Stone supplier | 103 | 48.1% |
| Conservation | 102 | 47.7% |
| Paving and setts | 99 | 46.3% |
| Technical advice | 98 | 45.8% |
| Cleaning and surface repairs | 97 | 45.3% |
| Landscaping | 90 | 42.1% |
| Carving, plaques and statues | 86 | 40.2% |
| Ecclesiastical | 85 | 39.7% |
| Interiors | 83 | 38.8% |
| Design, drawing and surveying | 82 | 38.3% |
| Fixings | 82 | 38.3% |
| Walling | 82 | 38.3% |
| Fireplaces | 72 | 33.6% |
| Consultant | 70 | 32.7% |
| Kitchens and worktops | 65 | 30.4% |
| Bathroom | 64 | 29.9% |
| Principal contractor | 64 | 29.9% |
| Memorials | 61 | 28.5% |
| Lettercutting | 55 | 25.7% |
| Importing | 43 | 20.1% |
| Other | 40 | 18.7% |
| Quarry operator | 32 | 15.0% |
| Roofing | 32 | 15.0% |
| Fixings only | 26 | 12.1% |
| Chemicals | 24 | 11.2% |
| Linings | 24 | 11.2% |
| Testing services | 21 | 9.8% |
| Expert witness | 20 | 9.3% |
| Tools | 9 | 4.2% |
| Machinery | 7 | 3.3% |
Two entries at the bottom are worth noticing. Nine firms in the entire membership supply tools, and seven supply machinery. For a trade that cannot function without either, that is a thin supply chain, and it is a reasonable guess that most British masons buy from suppliers who are not federation members at all.
Method, and where these numbers could be wrong
Source. The public Stone Federation Great Britain member directory, captured 14 August 2026: 214 member pages, each parsed for name, address, postcode, email, phone, website, specialities and stone types. Field completeness on the source: 99.5% have an address, 99.1% a phone and email, 98.1% a website, 93.0% list specialities, 88.3% list stone types, 76.2% carry a usable postcode and 50.0% have any description text.
Places. Postcodes were resolved through postcodes.io to a country, region and district. Of 160 unique postcodes, 155 resolved directly and 5 had been retired, so those were placed by their outcode instead. Regional shares are quoted against the 163 members who carry a postcode at all, not against all 214. Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands are reported as themselves rather than being folded into an English region scheme that does not cover them.
Reproducing it. Every count on this page is produced by a single analysis script run against the captured list. Nothing has been rounded by hand or estimated, and both inputs are public, so the work is repeatable from scratch by anyone with the member directory and postcodes.io. We have not republished the member-level records themselves, because that list is Stone Federation’s to publish and it already does. If you want our aggregate tables as a spreadsheet, ask at [email protected] and we will send them.
Four limits worth being clear about.
- Self-declaration. Nothing here is verified against what firms actually do. A member who ticks conservation may do one church a decade. This measures claims.
- Membership is not the industry. Stone Federation members are a self-selecting subset of British stone businesses: the ones who join a trade body and pay for it. Our own directory carries 406 published IE/UK stone businesses, of which 117 are federation members. Small and regional firms are systematically under-represented in any trade-body list, so read every regional share as “of the membership”, never “of the trade”.
- Registered offices. 51 members carry no postcode at all and are excluded from the geography entirely, and among those included, the address is where the company is registered rather than where it works.
- A snapshot. Members join and leave. This is 14 August 2026 and nothing more.
Why we published this
The stone trade is well documented as a craft and badly documented as an industry. There is no shortage of writing about how stone is cut and almost none about who is cutting it, where, and for what kind of building. The one public dataset that could answer some of that was sitting on a membership page, one firm at a time, where the shape of it is invisible.
If you are researching the British stone industry, every figure here is free to quote and the tables are free to reproduce. A link back is appreciated, and [email protected] will get you the aggregate data as a spreadsheet.
If you are a homeowner, the practical residue of all this is short. Federation membership is worth asking about and is not a job description. Nearly two thirds of the membership is in the repair business, so if you have an old building there is more expertise available to you than you might expect. And whoever you hire, ask which stone they are proposing and where it was quarried, because the one question this dataset proves nobody’s tick boxes will answer for you is that one.
Find a stonemason, quarry or supplier near you, or start from the stone itself.