Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

Since it is ultimately just reconstituted grains of sand and stone, glued into a new stony formation with the help of that lime, it too is made from local grains. Lay your hand on a concrete block in Manchester and you are likely touching gravel and rocks from the Peak District. Concrete in New York often began its life as sand from Jamaica Bay in Long Island. London’s concrete has an even more mystical backstory, since much of the sand and aggregate used to make it is scraped up from a shallow-lying sandbank in the North Sea called Dogger Bank. Back in the last Ice Age when sea levels were lower, this was a land bridge connecting the UK and Europe. This submerged land—Doggerland, as it is sometimes called—has also provided much of the sand used to shore up the Netherlands, and for that matter to create London’s Canary Wharf. Next time you see a concrete block in Britain’s capital and are tempted to dismiss it as a modernist monstrosity, ponder for a moment that it may well have been made of the sands from this mysterious drowned world, out in the middle of the North Sea.