At Home - Bill Bryson [111]
Coal was hard on practically everything—on clothes, paintings, plants, furniture, books, buildings, and respiratory systems. During weeks of really bad fog, the number of recorded deaths in London could easily increase by a thousand. Even pets and animals at the Smithfield meat market died in disproportionately increased numbers.
Coal smoke was particularly hard on stone buildings. Structures that looked radiant when new often deteriorated with alarming swiftness. Portland stone took on a disturbing piebald appearance, assuming a brilliant whiteness on every face that was exposed to winds and rain, but becoming a filthy black under every sill, lintel, and sheltered corner. At Buckingham Palace, Nash employed Bath stone because he thought it would wear better; he was wrong. Almost immediately it began to crumble. A new architect, Edward Blore, was brought in to fix the building. He enclosed Nash’s courtyard with a new frontage built out of Caen stone. It, too, began to fall apart almost at once. Most alarming of all were the new Houses of Parliament, where the stone began to blacken and develop shocking pits and gouges, as if raked with gunfire, even while the building was going up. Desperate remedies were attempted to halt the deterioration. Various combinations of gums, resins, linseed oil, and beeswax were painted onto the surface, but these either did nothing or produced new and even more alarming stains.
Just two materials seemed to be impervious to the insult of corrosive acids. One was a remarkable artificial stone known as Coade stone (named after Eleanor Coade, who owned the factory that made it). Coade stone was immensely popular and was used by every leading architect from about 1760 to 1830. It was practically indestructible and could be shaped into any kind of ornamental object—friezes, arabesques, capitals, modillions, or any other decorative thing that would normally be carved. The best known Coade object is the large lion on Westminster Bridge near the Houses of Parliament, but Coade stone can be found all over—at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Tower of London, on the tomb of Captain Bligh in the churchyard of St. Mary-at-Lambeth, London.
Coade stone looks and feels exactly like worked stone, and weathers as hard as the hardest stone, but it isn’t stone at all. It is, surprisingly, a ceramic. Ceramics are baked clay. Depending on the type of clay and how intensely they are fired, they yield one of three different materials: earthenware, stoneware, or porcelain. Coade stone is a type of stoneware, but an especially hard and durable type. Most Coade stone is so resistant to weather and pollution that it looks almost brand-new even after nearly two and a half centuries of exposure to the elements.
Considering its ubiquity and remarkable characteristics, surprisingly little is known about Coade stone and its eponymous maker. Where and when it was invented, how Eleanor Coade became involved with it, and why the firm came to a sudden end sometime in the late 1830s are all matters that have failed to excite much scholarly interest. Coade receives only half a dozen paragraphs in the Dictionary of National Biography, and the only full-scale history of her and her firm was a work self-published by the historian Alison Kelly in 1999.
What can be said for certain is that Eleanor Coade was the daughter of a failed businessman from Exeter, who came to London in about 1760 and ran a successful business selling linens. Toward the end of the decade she met one Daniel Pincot, who was already engaged in the manufacture of artificial stone. They opened a factory on the south side of the Thames about where Waterloo Station stands today and began producing an unusually high-grade material. Coade is often credited as its inventor, but it seems more likely that Pincot had the method and she the money. In any case, Pincot