This is the first phase of the A63 Castle Street, Hull scheme. A pedestrian footbridge crossing the A63 to improve safety is being erected and the footbridge itself is being named ‘Murdoch’s Connection’ which immortalises the city’s first female GP, Dr Mary Murdoch.  

THE JOURNEY

IP Surfaces produced a 5 metre panel made of European Amarelo Montemuro granite which was placed within a cladded wall area of the footbridge steps. The panel has within it a Crystal Black granite tile that reveals a digitally enhanced image of Mary Murdock, a Scottish-born physician and suffragist who had a lifelong association with Kingston upon Hull. The granite was impact-etched from an original photograph. Waterjet cut letters are also inlayed into the larger panel. The project also has a large bespoke element of granite steps, treads and cladding units each of which required individual production drawings. The name ‘Murdoch’s Connection’ was chosen by school students in an essays competition to determine which of the area’s iconic figures should be honoured. Pupils from the Newland School for Girls and Archbishop Sentamu Academy submitted 100 essays to a judging panel which chose Dr Murdoch after whittling it down to a shortlist of five people. The question was then opened to the public, attracting 55,000 votes. CGI images courtesy of Arup.

At the very heart of Petersfield Museum’s expansion and refurbishment project, ‘Pathways into the Past’ will be a 25sqm showpiece artwork that really puts the Museum on the map. Within the courtyard floor will be a bird’s eye design inspired by the town and surrounding villages within a 22-mile radius, most of which is in the South Downs National Park.  

THE JOURNEY

Designed in-house, the piece is currently being produced at IP Surfaces and is being made from 2 types of granite, Kobra Green and Violet Pearl using waterjet and laser-etch technologies. This innovative ‘destination map’ will be embedded with 21 stainless steel icons representing the surrounding villages’ unique characteristics and a brass ‘keys of St. Peter’ icon to symbolise Petersfield, all of which will glint in the sunlight, and entice visitors to go out, explore and enjoy the wonderful local landscapes. The courtyard will be a unique and distinctive space – a hub for al-fresco performances, creative activities, café tables with cake and coffee from The Servery and multiple events to bring the community together.

Cosmic House in Holland Park, Kensington, is a Grade I listed building with Historic England, located at Lansdowne Walk. It was designed by the late Charles Jencks in collaboration with other postmodern architects. Charles Jencks was still working shortly before his death, overseeing improvements to the garden at Maggie’s Inverness. His London home has become a museum of his archives. His daughter, Lily, herself an architect in her own right, has been inspirational in the creative designs that IP Surfaces undertook.  

Our Journey

The pieces shown consist of circular German Dietfurt limestone that the team at IP Surfaces have waterjet-cut to create a double-jointed circle and 2 separate circles each with individual laser-etched artwork that reflects Charles Jencks’ interest he held in science and cosmology. Each piece was carefully produced by our craftsmen working with the limestone and stencil lettering producing striking designs with 3 RAL colour reds used on the surface and 1 of the colours around the edge of the circle. Thematic House remains a residence but also has become a publicly accessible archive of both Jencks’ own work, as a landscape designer and scholar, and of drawings, letters and models by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid and other Maggie’s Centre architects. Jencks and his late wife Maggie founded the cancer care charity. In situ photography: Hardscape and Nick Harrison FLI

The aim of the project is to significantly raise the profile of the Cathedral within the City and to make people pause and engage, to provide peace and opportunity for reflection, to help people interact and visit the Cathedral, to learn, understand and feel welcome.  

Our Journey

A feature natural stone ribbon has been designed as part of the Common Ground in Sacred Space project to run and ‘flow’ around the perimeter of the building and has been produced at IP Surfaces in Kilkenny Irish Blue limestone with 3 different textured finishes with an initial flamed effect and then 2 different intensity laser-etching which picks out the contrast of the material when wet and dry. Words of encouragement and affirmation are also laser-etched into the limestone at intervals along the ribbon paving. The Lottery-funded project aims to capture the imagination of visitors and encourage them to enter the Cathedral having contemplated the messages within the ribbon to hopefully see life from a different perspective.

The University of Central Lancashire’s (UCLan) stunning new £60 million Student Centre and University Square is now the focal point of the Preston Campus where the city’s first public square for 70 years has become the place for students and local communities to come together and enjoy many university and public events for years to come.  

Our Journey

The focus of attention of the designed aesthetics of the Square itself are the bespoke benches and also the patterned walling that runs adjacent to the Student Centre. Preston-trained artist and sculptor Halima Cassell (who in 2021 was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours) was commissioned to design a series of applied ‘Industrial Art’ works based on her enduring interest in 3D tiling repeat patterns. Integrated directly into the actual design fabric of the public realm, these designs have formed the decorative embellishments to the granite used in retaining the ‘Miley Tunnel’ walling on Rodney Street and integrated seating sited around the university’s new square. These beautifully bespoke new benches were created collaboratively, with the artist working closely with Hardscape’s sister company IP Surfaces and the client team on a series of initial hand-drawn sketches which were re-interpreted to CAD-based setting-out drawings, from countless sampling of materials’ trialling methods of designs with IP Surfaces to establish if it were even possible to recreate the patterns technologically. IP Surfaces were able to demonstrate that ‘anything is possible’ and pursued Halima’s vision to re-create her intricate patterns into 3D drawings in their state-of-the art facilities utilising production techniques such as CNC waterjet, laser-etched and sandblasting techniques, together with hand-skilled masons to create incredibly unique, bespoke, sculptured, surface-embellished features, to adorn the surroundings of University Square. The new development is the culmination of UCLan’s Masterplan project, launched in 2015, which set out a vision to create a state-of-the-art, sustainable campus for students, staff, visitors, and surrounding communities for years to come. The material used for the patterned walling was Kobra and Crystal Black granites with a combination of flamed, honed and polished waterjet-cut elements which gave a really striking contrast and dramatic aesthetic to the finished wall. For the Royal White granite benches IP Surfaces used their 5-Axis CNC using a router tool and then had stone masons finishing it off using manual hand cutters before it went into a sandblasting container to remove any saw marks. IP Surfaces went through many surface-embellishment processes to arrive at these finishes which, in collaboration with Halima, became a proven triumph for what can be made possible when vision becomes a reality. With Halima’s visionary ideas of her patterns and designs, IP Surfaces were determined to make her dream a reality and went through many trials and tests to achieve the ‘hand carved appearance’ for the benches in particular with incredible attention to the surface shape, texture and finish. A testament to the collaboration involved and the combination of human skill, ingenuity, and technological advancement with stone material manipulation techniques.

Ian Banks commissioned as Public Art Consultant by Preston City Council helped manage and oversee the physical install of a large bronze by Aardman Animations in Preston city centre in September 2021. Ian’s brief was to facilitate and then deliver a permanent public sculpture for the city centre. As part of the new public realm, Oscar-winning animation studio Aardman Animations had been approached by the city council to design and install a permanent bronze of much-loved animation characters Wallace & Gromit. Their resulting bench assembly is now permanently sited outside the main pedestrian entrance to Preston Market.  

Our Journey

IP Surfaces collaborated with Art Consultant Ian Banks from Atoll UK and used a combination of Kobra, Kobra Green flamed granites with Premium Black polished granite lettering created by manual stencilling and sandblasting. To complement the inlayed artwork pavers, Magma flamed granite setts was used for the surrounding paved area. The 7-foot-high bronze statue consists of a full size but stretched traditional street bench where Gromit sits to one side reading his local newspaper. Behind, Wallace wearing the ex-NASA ‘Techo Trousers‘ first bought for Gromit’s birthday in the film, and tilted on one leg, offers passers-by a happy thumbs-up. When originally commenting on his proposals back in 2007, Nick Park had said: “This is a really exciting project and I’m delighted to be working on the designs for a Wallace and Gromit statue in Preston. As a Prestonian myself, it would be a wonderful honour to have a statue to Wallace and Gromit in my home city.”

The Glade of Light is a memorial commemorating the victims of the 22 May 2017 terrorist attack at Manchester Arena and honours the 22 people whose lives were taken, as well as remembering everyone who was left injured or affected. It was designed to be a living memorial, a tranquil garden space for remembrance and reflection. Its peaceful surroundings are intended as the setting for commemorative events in the city relating to the attack. Winners of a Manchester City Council inspired competition, the memorial, and the garden in which it is located, was designed by Liverpool-based landscape architects BCA Landscape and creative agency Smiling Wolf. Altrincham-based landscape architects Planit-IE wrote the specification for the competition memorial.  

Our Journey

IP Surfaces wanted to take responsibility itself for the construction of the memorial on site, having fashioned the 26 pieces of Carrara marble that formed the two sections of the ‘halo’ at its factory at Logistics North, Bolton. Galliford Try had been chosen as the main contractor and IP Surfaces’ sister company, Hardscape, had been chosen by landscape architect Planit-IE, who wrote the specification for the competition for the memorial, to supply the stone for the garden in the Medieval Quarter. The project team visited eight quarries in Carrara, Tuscany, all pre-Covid timings and conditions, before deciding on the particular marble they wanted, which needed to be technically sound to offer the least amount of movement as well as being aesthetically pleasing. BCA Landscape wanted the marble slabs to be bookmatched (see top right image below the drawings). As Andy Thomson told the Architects Journal: “Bookmatching creates a beautiful effect within the marbled surface that also mimics the bilateral symmetry that we see in nature and is particularly evident in the ephemeral moment of a passing butterfly.” Once the slabs had arrived in the UK at IP Surfaces, the project team came to inspect them and BCA Landscape chose precisely where the cuts would be made for bookmatching. By the time the slabs were being cut, Covid restrictions had begun and the decisions on individual slabs were made using remote digital assets via the internet. Each of the 26 slabs weighed 2.3tonnes and each took a full day to cut to radius and embellish on the CNC at IP Surfaces state-of-the-art facility. Several loads of the marble slabs were transported to site organised by Hardscape’s logistics team and then professionally installed by a Hardscape recommended sub-contractor. In the centre of each of the joining edges of the slabs is a semicircle, which accommodates a ‘memory capsule’, containing personal and appropriate memories of their loved ones. These were capped onsite with bronze lids with marble inlays and central bronze hearts. The caps were both resin-bonded and mechanically fixed into position and sealed by hand by an IP Surfaces skilled stonemason. The names of the deceased are also written in the stone, with the inscription being cut by waterjet into the marble and filled with brass inserts. There are bronze dividers between each of the slabs that, like the memory capsule lids, protrude ‘proud’ of the surface. This is largely to discourage skateboarders from damaging the memorial. The joints were also further complicated by there being a slight fall on the marble surface to stop water pooling on it. The joints had to accommodate the fall; hence they were cut on a waterjet to achieve the compound angle required. The marble was sealed with a Tenax Stoneline 81 product to protect it and make it easier to keep clean. IP Surfaces’ Founding Director, Mathew Haslam, reflected by stating: “It’s a great example of what stone can achieve; how you can manipulate it to achieve a design intention for a particular location, and the awesome energy it can bring to a project. What has been achieved here has received the sort of recognition that is usually reserved for a building. It has all the ingredients of what I stand for and what the team here assists me in achieving on an hour-by-hour basis. I’m very proud of our part we played in this meaningful and iconic project.”

Located on the sea wall, the trail of a series of installed 31 polished black granite Storyboards along Scarborough’s Marine Drive, manufactured for the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre, tells the story of Scarborough’s history. The idea for the project came about from the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre in 2019, and were consequently awarded £40,000 by the National Lottery Heritage Fund at the start of 2022. Also involved with the project was the Archaeological and Historical Society and the Scarborough & District Civic Society with permission to use the sea wall given by Scarborough Borough Council. Each ‘Porthole in Time’ tells a small part of Scarborough’s rich and varied history. People walking the trail can learn more via a smartphone ‘App’ or website to get more details on each of the Portholes. Local residents and visitors, together with students from local schools, helped select the historical topics to feature in the project. IP Surfaces collated all of the original designs and artwork, collaborating closely with Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre, and reproduced them for their CNC production techniques of reverse etching and sandblasting the Premium Black granite polished portholes including meticulous hand-crafted attention to detail by the IP Surfaces team. Project Manager, Huw Roberts, a Trustee of the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre, commented at the time of installation: “This is great news for Scarborough, and its residents and visitors. Whatever was happening in history, ancient or modern, Scarborough has been up there making the news and contributing to one of the most fascinating and unique heritages of any town in Britain.” The trail of the 31 information portholes was installed in November 2022 and inaugurated by local award-winning playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn on 6th December 2022.

Public Artist Tom Pearman was commissioned by Aldi UK and Abingdon-on-Thames Town Council for a series (3 in total) of bespoke stools, 500mm diameter x 550mm high, and bespoke stainless-steel cycle stands for their new car park and entrance area. The stools were based upon oven dials and the cycle stands upon various food types. As part of the programme, Tom worked with art students at Abingdon & Witney College creating a series animated GIF files of domestic switches turning on and off to be displayed in the supermarket entrance lobby. The students made gif files of kitchen appliances turning ON and OFF. The theme of the artworks was designed to complement the OVEN DIAL STOOLS recently installed in the store’s exterior. Tom collaborated with IP Surfaces and chose a Royal White Granite for the stools with an inlaid Premium Black granite element and inlaid 50mm diameter Hi-macs (3 colour types) also 130mm x 130mm premium Black granite inlaid into top with sandblasted artwork. Dowel holes were drilled into the base with recesses for logistics and offloading. The stainless-steel cycle stands were all waterjet-cut into various food-type symbols for the canopied area at the side of the store.