St. Martin's Square, Basildon

As part of the regeneration plan for Basildon Town Centre, the Basildon street market has been relocated to the revamped St Martin's Square. This includes for the design and installation of five large multiple section planter/seating units in flame textured, speckled, silver-grey granite. These provide a lovely, peaceful space to sit and relax when needing a break from walking around the market.

Our choice of using a Spanish granite for this project was made for a number of reasons. The granite looks stunning when flame textured, it is available in very large block sizes and there is the necessary skilled masons available at the Spanish factory to handwork the finish, ensuring a neat final fit. Due to the size of some of the sections the CNC machine could only work the stone to partial completion, with specialist masons required to complete the very complex final details.

Each planter included several special radius sections as well as bespoke angled corner pieces. Many of the sections tapered considerably on both width and length adding to the difficulty in producing these so that they would fit accurately with a minimal mastic joint between units. The design also included for anti skateboard grooves and a robust 50mm rounding on the upper leading outside edges.