75 Stone street
Bathroom materials
It’s not only the house itself that’s made from rock. Every room in the house is full of objects that were made from rocks. There’s nowhere you can escape from rocks - not even when relaxing in the bath.
Click on the circle areas to find out more
Book
Do you like to relax in the bathroom with a book or magazine? Well, most of the paper used to make books contains about one third china clay. The clay helps provide a smooth surface for better printing and color.
The clay itself is extracted from huge pits on Dartmoor. It’s formed where granite has been weathered, and the milky-white mineral called feldspar has turned from a hard mineral into soft clay.
Granite contains quartz and mica as well as feldspar and these other minerals have to be washed away to leave just the clay. This is done in the pit with a huge hosepipe or drier called a monitor.
Light bulb
At night, you’ll need the light on in your bathroom if you want to read. A light bulb may not look very rocky, but all the metals used in the light bulb are found in the earth as compounds, mostly as oxides or sulphides.
China cup
Maybe you’re one of those kids who loves a cup of tea while reading about the wonderful world of rocks? If the tea’s in a china cup it will also be made of china clay. Some of the oldest manufactured objects in the world are pieces of pottery.
Medicine
Hopefully, you won’t need to go into the bathroom too often because of tummy upsets, but if you do, good old china clay will come to the rescue again – stomach medicine is made with real kaolin, AKA china clay!
Loo and washbasin
Even the loo itself is made from clay, heated to make it hard. This is a special kind of clay called ball clay, dug from pits in Devon and Dorset. It has the same origins as china clay, but instead of being extracted from the weathered granite, it has been naturally transported by ancient rivers and deposited in its present position.
During its journey, the particles of clay eroded, making them even smaller than they were already. This makes the clay sticky and adaptable like play-dough. It’s called ball clay because it's carried from the pit in large blobs about the size of a beach ball!
Ball clay is also used for the washbasin, the tiles and for some baths. Many baths are made from cast iron - dug from the ground as iron ore, then melted with coke and limestone; or from plastic - made from oil, also dug from the ground.
Toothpaste
Toothpaste is mostly limestone. When you clean your teeth you need something ‘rough’ to remove the unwanted bits of food without damaging your teeth. Powdered limestone is softer than teeth and does not scratch them; it’s also harmless if swallowed.
Cosmetics and soap
Many cosmetics have a rocky origin. Bubble bath comes from petrochemicals. One of the ingredients for soap, sodium hydroxide, is processed from salt. Lipsticks and many face creams are a mixture of chemicals taken from crude oil and clay.
Face packs are made from clay. The really good muddy brown ones come from a special kind of clay called Fuller’s Earth. Fuller’s Earth is good at absorbing oil and grease and is used as a mud pack to put on faces to clean the skin. Fuller’s Earth used to be used by fullers - people who cleaned sheep’s wool before it was spun.
Pumice stone and soapstone
The pumice stone we use to get rid of all the horrible yucky bits from our feet is actually volcanic pumice. Some of the shaped ones are ground up and re-made, but they are still the mineral, pumice. Some really fancy chemists still sell lumps of the raw stone that float in the bath.
Soapstone is a rock made of the softest mineral in the world, talc. Talcum powder is ground-up talc. Talc is usually found with the rock serpentinite, most often in isolated parts of Cornwall and the Scottish Islands.
Bath taps
Posh bath taps may be gold-plated or brass but the ones at 75 Stone Street, like most taps, are chrome-plated iron. What all these ‘materials’ have in common is that they’re dug from the ground. Gold is found as an element (in other words, as the actual metal). Copper is occasionally found as the metal, but along with zinc is usually found as an ore. Iron and Chromium are also mined as ores.
Water
The water that comes from the tap has earthy origins, too. All water has at some stage spent time underground in the Earth. On the outskirts of London, holes dug deep into the chalk are the main source of water. It tastes good, but having so much dissolved chalk makes the water hard - so Londoners need to use water softener or lots of extra bubble bath!