The best way to observe London, with all its charm and beauty, oddity and idiosyncrasy, is from the top of a bus, and mine was the 31—the only one that went to the World’s End and passed through some of the most varied and vibrant parts of the city. Starting in Camden High Street outside the World’s End pub, it headed up past Camden Lock to the old railway marshaling yards and the Roundhouse that had just become a cool music venue and then on round the strangely kitsch Swiss Cottage. It swung south down the hill past Abbey Road to cross the Kilburn High Road and on through Notting Hill Gate.
Pausing for the lights at the bottom of Kensington Church Street, you could peer out at the lovely reliefs of 1930s airplanes and steam engines carved on to the facade of Barkers in High Street Kensington before you turned west past the neo-gothic charm of St Mary Abbots and south again through avenues of peeling bedsits in Earls Court towards the wrong end of the King’s Road in Chelsea. There the conductor would shout, “All change,” because it had not just reached the end of the line but also another World’s End pub in the King’s Road. A quick stop for a cuppa in the transport café and then back north again, day after day, from World’s End to World’s End.
The approved method for catching the bus was to jump on when it was still moving by grabbing the white pole and swinging in, earning both the respect of your school friends and a furious tirade from the conductor. I would run upstairs into the smoky gloom of the top deck and try to get the front seats, where, if you opened the top windows with the little steel handle, most of the cigarette smoke would get blown to the back and you could sit with fresh London air streaming in. Eventually the conductor would work his way through the passengers, glaring at me accusingly as I ordered a half fare to Westbourne Grove with wide-eyed innocence. He would vigorously turn the knobs and handles on the intriguing steel ticket machine and out would come a faint strip of paper ticket, with its numbers and symbols printed in purple ink. Clutching this in my grubby hand, I would lean forward and enjoy one of the best views in London.
I was starting to join the ancient community of people who have cut beauty and order from rock, and I knew that I was in the right place.
It was the late 1960s, and London was still pretty patchy. It was more than 20 years since the end of the war, but there were plenty of areas that had not recovered from the Blitz. Neighborhoods like St. John’s Wood and Belsize Park were clean and prosperous, but then a few hundred yards down the road there was Kilburn. Damp houses with moldy plaster and broken windows lined streets between terrifying schools with grimy kids gazing forlornly through lethal wire fencing around the playgrounds. At the time, it was a downtrodden area favored by Irish immigrants, and it was little more than a slum. I used to look fearfully through the first-floor windows of the houses from my vantage point on the top deck into bare rooms with peeling wallpaper, cold and unfurnished, sad and empty. Then the bus would cross the Grand Union Canal, and we would head south along lovely streets with terraced houses, each with a well-kept little garden in front of it as we moved through the growing prosperity of Notting Hill and Kensington.
The contrast baffled and saddened me. It seemed so wrong that one could travel through such extremes—from poverty to wealth, from pain to comfort—all on a single smudged ticket. The abandoned and decaying buildings in Kilburn were no different from the houses in Camden or Notting Hill; it was just that they needed to be repaired, restored, cleaned up and loved, after which they would be every bit as beautiful and comfortable as the house that we lived in. There was clearly a link between beauty and well-being, but the developers and planners had other ideas. Before long they knocked down huge swathes of the Victorian houses so they could modernize the area, transforming the streets into their vision of an urban utopia, with brutalist high-rise blocks and car parks, with metal swings and slides for the children.
I looked at all this from the top deck and instinctively knew that something was wrong. Why would anyone want to destroy lovely old houses, the same houses that made Kensington so desirable, and replace them with buildings that resembled a pile of washing machines 30 floors high? How could this be right? I was not to know then but this passion for caring for beauty, and what was later to be defined as heritage, was to carry me to the ends of the world, far beyond the polar limits of Chelsea and Camden Town.
In my early teens I was taught to carve stone and wood by an eccentric genius called Don Potter. He was an artist and master craftsman who not only made great sculptures but also restored the old barn in which he and his family lived, fashioning the furniture and making all the plates and pots in his kitchen while his wife Mary wove the carpets and made the curtains. He was a hard taskmaster, like all good craftsmen, and frequently physically kicked boys out of the workshop for shoddy work or just being annoying. I was 13 when he taught me to cut stone for the first time, to struggle with the material and to fight the despair of breaking a piece off by mistake. He taught us that to make a good sculpture we just had to remove everything that was not required.
I later learned that Michelangelo had said the same thing, but I never found out whether Don knew this or whether it is just what every carver feels. As I developed from an apprentice to a master mason I shared my experiences with people around the world from stonemasons working on the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela to Syrian refugees from Aleppo and Homs. They too looked at me the same way I had looked at Don, with a mixture of respect and incomprehension. I recognized this quizzical look in their eyes and knew that they would eventually understand and come to feel the same way—the madness of masons is clearly contagious.
Cutting stone and conjuring beauty from a rock gives a sense of satisfaction that is hard to describe, but there is no doubt that every carver on the planet and throughout the millennia has felt the same as they stand back and see how something smooth and refined has emerged from the chaos of the rock that it was before. How they have created art and order from geology. I worked in Kosovo with one of the greatest Italian art restorers, Carlo Giantomassi, who had worked on Lorenzo Lottos, Raphaels and Caravaggios. As the viciously strong rakia got lower in the bottle, we animatedly discussed our different work. He, the paintings conservator, and me, the stone conservator. He told me he couldn’t get inspired by stone because it was so sadly monochrome and that it was color that creates depth and life. His love and his world-wide experience of working with painted art was unparalleled, but for me it was missing a dimension—we stone people have three, and like Pygmalion, the Greek sculptor who fell in love with his own sculptures, we have a special relationship.
I went on to university to study history, but it did not take long for me to realize that I was no academic. I would sit in the library staring forlornly out of the window, dreaming of carving and creating. I studied Renaissance history at the University of Warwick, and the main reason for doing so was that we were sent to study in Venice for a term. We would have seminars and lectures in the Palazzo Fortuny, but our greatest learning took place exploring the hidden little taverns known as bacari, where we tasted the exquisite classic Venetian salt cod on tiny slices of toast or baby octopus waving their little pink legs at us. Known locally as cicchetti, these are the Venetian equivalent of tapas, and you could find them down the sinister back alleys if you managed to elbow your way through the eclectic mix of bargees and lawyers. We would stare with hopeless longing at the effortlessly chic Venetian girls of our age sipping spritzes at the tables outside with a natural elegance and sophistication that was a world away from our grey Anglo-Saxon lives.
One afternoon I was walking along the Riva degli Schiavoni, and as I crossed the Ponte della Paglia, the bridge over the canal that leads to the Bridge of Sighs where all the tour groups stop to listen to guides and get their pockets picked, I saw a young stonemason working on one of the finials that decorate the balustrades. Silently, I watched him work and realized that this was what I wanted to do. This was history and stone carving—I needed to be part of it. After a while I plucked up the courage to ask him for advice. He told me he had been to a restoration school right here in Venice—he pointed out across the basin of San Marco towards one of the islands in the lagoon beyond San Giorgio Maggiore called San Servolo.
I left university with a mediocre degree and immediately headed back to Venice in the romantic belief that if I presented myself and showed willing, they would somehow let me work on the art. Unsurprisingly, this was not the case, but I stayed and survived by working various peculiar jobs that at least paid the rent. One of these was as an extra in a huge film production about Marco Polo that they were shooting on the Lido, which is the beach area that hems in the lagoon and has a series of fancy hotels and modern apartment blocks. In order to fill the gaps between the stars, they needed people who looked vaguely Italian but spoke English. That was pretty much the extent of my CV at the time, and before long I was shivering on the edge of the Lido dressed in a hessian smock with a terrible haircut.
I was to be Friend of Marco 2, and, as luck would have it, the mother of Friend of Marco 1 was head of the UNESCO bureau in Venice, and he suggested we meet. The ‘Baronessa’ was Venetian aristocracy and lived in a vast rococo palace with Guardis and Canalettos in the drawing room. She recommended that I go down to Rome to meet a British architect who was director general of an institution I had never heard of called ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property which confusingly is not an acronym). I was to find out that it is an intergovernmental organization that is part of the UN family and which promotes the conservation and restoration of cultural heritage all over the world.
Masons, carvers and conservators all work towards the preservation and enhancement and even creation of heritage, but as experience and knowledge grows so a gradual almost imperceptible transition occurs.
With the innocent enthusiasm of youth, I left the canals of Venice, boarded the train at Santa Lucia and headed down the peninsula past Padua, Bologna and Florence to meet Sir Bernard Feilden. When I arrived at ICCROM, the porter ushered me into a clunky iron lift, and I headed up to the director general’s office, where a kindly looking Englishman smiled and sat me down on a chair in front of his large wooden desk.
He asked me how he could help, and I told him that I wanted to work on the restoration of stone and ancient buildings. He glanced at my letter of recommendation and looked up again.
“You studied Renaissance history?”
“I did.”
“So, what do you think defined the Renaissance?”
I gulped and suggested that the real difference was that the patrons, aristocrats, popes and kings started to treat the artists as artists rather than mere decorators. That in the Middle Ages scant credit was given to artists, and they were thought of as little more than builders, decorators and masons. Then, in the Renaissance, the first great stars of art and architecture appeared—Mantegna, Raphael, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo—and the dynamic shifted; the patrons had to compete to persuade the artists to work for them, and their pay packets increased radically.
There was a long pause, and I thought maybe I had missed the point. Then he looked at me again and said, “Yes, you are right. And I will tell you another thing. Today there is a similar rift in our field: there are too many people in white coats who think they know it all and too many blue-collar artisans who are excluded from the process except as labor. If you can get trained as a mason, you will have a foot in both camps, and that will be a unique position. You have your degree, now go and get yourself trained as a mason.” This sage advice was to define my professional life.
With the innocent enthusiasm of youth, I applied to the Building Crafts Training School in Great Titchfield Street in London. Miraculously, I was accepted to start training as a stonemason.
We were taught by a gruff cockney called Fred Waring, who had participated in the D-Day landings in a regiment that had fought its way across Europe towards Berlin and liberated the concentration camp at Belsen. Not surprisingly, he stood for no nonsense and taught us as every mason has been taught before: the hard way. We had to start from a rough rock and square it up by hand, which took me a month. I had done sculpture with Don, but never had I had to work with the precision required by a mason, and the feeling of achievement when I cut my first straight draft along the side of a block was a completely different type of satisfaction. I had created precise order from nature.
We had to continue to work each side flat and square so that we could apply a template and start to carve a baluster which would have made up part of a balcony or balustrade. I was working the last side of a rectangular stone and had placed it on two wooden blocks to raise it up, so I didn’t have to bend down to work it. After a few hours of working my way down the block, it cracked in half. I looked up, devastated, and Fred walked over.
“I have been waiting for you to do that for two days now, you pillock.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, you have the natural beds across the block and they are weak point, and you are hitting it with a hammer and punch—of course it’s going to break.”
“But why didn’t you tell me before?”
He laughed. “Well, you’re not going to do it again, are you? There are more blocks in the store.”
He was right—four decades later, I am still going on about it. This is how masons learn. When I was teaching in Lebanon, I yelled the same things at my students and pushed them in the same way, the way it has been done for millennia. They hated it, but before long they loved me for it, the same way as I grudgingly loved my teachers.
I was starting to join the ancient community of people who have cut beauty and order from rock, and I knew that I was in the right place. My early feelings of sorrow at the loss of beauty that I felt on the number 31 bus developed, with the help of many formidable professionals in the field, as well as many horny-handed masons and builders, into an awareness of the issues, methods and materials that are required to actually do something about it, and to play a role in preserving the beauty that has been created over the centuries in order that we may pass it on to our children in all its authenticity.
Over time I have moved from the role of artisan and craftsman to that of teacher. Masons, carvers and conservators all work towards the preservation and enhancement and even creation of heritage, but as experience and knowledge grows so a gradual almost imperceptible transition occurs, and the conservator of materials becomes a conservator and custodian of knowledge and tradition that when passed on becomes even more important than the hands-on activity.
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Excerpted from Monumental: A Stonemason’s Tale by Simon Warrack. Copyright © 2026 by Simon Warrack. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
