ABOVE: Frimstone’s Snettisham site is the only quarry in the country producing carrstone suitable for building stone
Frimstone’s 70 years of rock solid quality... A family-owned business with a wealth of experience in mineral extraction, recycling and restoration projects in the East Anglia region, Frimstone is looking to the future with confidence...
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s long as man has been on the earth, he’s been digging up stone and ore. Today, almost everything in our modern lives – from the walls and windows of our houses, the roads and pavements, even paper and toothpaste – harbours the kind of mineral and aggregate product that Frimstone quarries from the ground each year. Frimstone is a family business which grew alongside the M. Dickerson business, eventually growing into the Dickerson group of companies. Maurice Dickerson started out as a haulier in 1925 with a single lorry. He formed M. Dickerson in 1937 in Cambridgeshire and concentrated on hauling building materials for airfields. During the Second World War he took on the dangerous job of transporting bombs from their manufacturing bases in the Midlands to the East Anglian docks. It wasn’t until after the war that the first sand quarry was acquired at Waterbeach and the company started actually digging up the material it had been so busy transporting.
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It was Maurice Dickerson’s son John who developed the first Norfolk quarries under the Frimstone trading name. The Dickerson Group continued to expand (adding a waste management business in the early 1980’s) until in 2010 the Group of companies was sold and John Dickerson’s youngest daughter Rachel and her husband Mark Davenport (the Managing Director of the Group) bought Frimstone and M Dickerson outright. Last year the companies were merged into one business and trade under the Frimstone name. Frimstone now has 18 operational sites in East Anglia. Its head office is located in purpose-built offices just
outside Downham Market at the centre of its network of quarries. It has the distinction of being the only aggregates company in the UK to be awarded a Royal Warrant – and not only does it supply Sandringham with all its aggregate needs, but it actually used to operate a quarry on the estate. The business is firmly tied to the history and locality of Norfolk and there’s something satisfying in the knowledge that the experience of recycling so many airfields has put the company and East Anglia at the forefront of recycling nationally – 50% of the company’s business is in this area. “Partly, recycling is born out of necessity,” explains Gary Bell, Frimstone’s Managing Director. “East Anglia isn’t blessed with hard rock. Aggregates are a finite resource. They have to be husbanded and balanced with the amount of recycling that we do. We see ourselves as a green business.” It’s partly the innovations and development of recycling not only airfields (of which the region has many)
KLmagazine April 2012