John Watson Building Stones Collection

The John Watson Building Stones Collection is a comprehensive collection of traditional building stones, decorative and ornamental stones, road stones, roofing slates and flagstones that were in extensive use throughout Britain, its colonies and parts of the rest of the world during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is based on an original private collection of 300 British and foreign building stones and specimens, illustrating the manufacture of plasters and cements from their raw materials, given to the Sedgwick Museum by Watson upon his retirement from the Portland cement industry in 1905. Watson continued to develop the collection for the Museum up until his death in 1918, by which time the collection comprised approximately 2,500 well documented specimens, mostly covered by Watson’s published catalogues.

The collection is held in the John Watson Building Stones Gallery in the Department of Earth Sciences and is not currently open to the public, but accessible by appointment to researchers and for occasional group tours. For enquiries about this collection, please email museumcollections@esc.cam.ac.uk. 

John Watson

Born in 1842 in the north of England, John Watson was employed at the Gateshead Portland Cement Works, ultimately becoming Managing Director. Around 1902-1904, he may have also been a consultant to the new cement works near Cambridge at Barrington and Cherry Hinton. Following his retirement, he moved to Cambridge in 1909 and began working on his ever-growing collection of specimens. He is credited not only with donating many specimens to the Museum but also for arranging, labelling and cataloguing them. The University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary MA around 1912, and he was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1917. In 1911 he published his “British and Foreign Building Stones” descriptive catalogue of specimens, and in 1916 the catalogue “British and Foreign Marbles and Other Ornamental Stones”. His “Cements and Artificial Stone” catalogue was published posthumously in 1922 following his death in 1918. 

The specimens and catalogues

Many of the specimens are housed in bespoke oak cases along the four walls of the gallery The building stones are, for the most part, approximately 4½ inch cubes, while the marble and ornamental stone specimens are mostly polished slabs, either 4 inches square or 18 x 12 inches. The larger slabs are mounted in wooden frames on the wall, and roofing slates and flagstones are hung on the walls above the cabinets. Many of the specimens have labels attached to the front which typically detail the name by which the stone was best known in commerce, the stratigraphic position of the stone or its petrological description, and the name of the donor.

Information on the usage of the stones, along with some physical attributes such as specific gravity and crushing strain was provided by Watson in his three published catalogues. The museum holds annotated copies of these catalogues. One copy of the “British and Foreign Building Stones” catalogue is annotated in Alfred Harker's handwriting. Thin sections cut from the building stones have been incorporated into the Petrology and other collections. Some parts of collection, including the Roadstones, Flagstones and later additions of specimens, were not recorded in the published catalogues. Dr Colin Forbes (1922 – 2014), a Curator and benefactor of the Sedgwick Museum, contributed some of the later additions to the collection.

Colonialism and the collection

Watson acquired many specimens from across the British Empire at a time when geological resources in territories controlled by the United Kingdom were heavily exploited. As Watson describes in his catalogues, the types of stone in the collection were used to build and decorate British monuments and infrastructure across the empire. The donors of some of the specimens were colonial administrators, mercantile companies or geological surveys established to map resources. Watson’s original catalogues and labels use outdated, colonial-era placenames, such as ‘Cape Colony’ (in present day South Africa) and ‘Gold Coast’ (now Ghana). The descriptions of the specimens in his catalogues, while recording much about the physical properties of the stones and their uses, tell us relatively little about the stories of individuals who quarried or mined any of the specimens, or the local historical, social or spiritual contexts of the stones. Parts of the colonial history of the collection have been explored as part of research for the University of Cambridge’s Legacies of Enslavement programme.

For further enquiries about this collection, please email museumcollections@esc.cam.ac.uk