Consuming Interest
Plastic Stone
By LESLIE ADRIAN ONE day about a year ago an exuberant and wealthy South African farmer walked into the offices of a firm of merchant bankers in the City clutching two polythene bags of what looked like damp gravel. The .result of his visit was the development of one of the most interesting new materials in the building trade today.
It consists of a mixture of crushed rock and transparent plastic cement which can be applied to surfaces in almost the same way as ordinary plaster and, when set, looks exactly like natural stone. One of its attractions is the beautiful range of natural colours in which it is marketed. These go from an alabaster-white to deep reds, greens, and a coal-like black.
Its other great attraction in this country is that it is comparatively non-porous and does not streak in a smoggy atmosphere. The LCC are already using it most effectively on new school buildings, and the new St. Michael's Church in Knollys Street, New Cross, which is faced with this material, has survived its first London winter without any sign of smog marking.
The material can be used as an interior wall surface not only in living-rooms but in bathrooms or kitchens. As a fireplace surrounding, it will withstand heat as well as most ceramic tiles. Its special undercoating provides a bonding: Of immense strength and it is almost impossible to chip it off. It can be applied to metal, glass, Stone or wood.
Called `Glamorock' by its inventor, the name —despite the pained expressions it eVokes in architectural circles—has now been patented. If you have had any experience of plastering as a do-it-yourself man, you should be able to apply it easily. With undercoating, it costs 25s. 8d. per seven-pound pack and is now available from good builders' merchants. The cost works out at ap- proximately 10s. per square yard.
Since my fiat was burgled I have been anxious to improve the lock. Friends have offered various, solutions-, but eventually, by devious encounters, I was introduced to The Expert, the professional housebreaker, to tell me how I could make 'my home burglar-proof. He was not particularly hopeful. To The Expert no known domestic lock has so far proved un- beatable. But several of the better types, he assured me, will at least fox the casual sneak-thief.
The Yale-type spring lock is one of the simplest to open, a piece.of celluloid, six inches square can be worked round the door jamb, and yet be strong enough to push the spring back. You can prevent this, my professional acquaintance told me, by hammering into the door jamb three tin-tacks above the lock and three below; they should pro- trude about one-eighth of an inch. This is probably safer than using the old-fashioned mortice lock, of which there are only three basic types and fewer than a dozen variations, all of which can be opened by a skeleton key.
The locks made by Chubb and Banham's have very much more complicated movements; opening them by skeleton key is possible, but difficult. Cer- tainly they discourage the sneak-thief. The Inger- soll lever lock foils both the skeleton-key burgler and the celluloid crook and the only way entry can be made is by removing the lock. Alas, says The Expert, thieves have already evolved a tool for the job.
Prices of Chubb locks are from 39s. 6d. to 170s.; Banham's cost £6 6s.; and Ingersoll have two front-door models, costing 52s. 6d. and 77s.
.Remembering with gratitude a book Theodora FitzGibbon wrote a while back on planning cater- ing and cooking for weekends in the country, I am glad to see a successor, Country House Cooking (Andre Deutsch, 15s.). She has taken the recipes from personal recipe books, most of them dating from the last century; and if they help to rescue English cooking from the unmerited contempt into which it has fallen (largely, as the author realise's, because of a failure to adapt old country-house dishes to the needs of a servant- hall-less community), Mrs. FitzGibbon will have done a valuable service. My only quarrel with the bdok concerns the lack of biographical informa- tion about some of the authois : itripl-essionable gtieSts would be the more impressed to hear not just the name of the inventors, or sponsors, a the recipes, but also some facts about them.
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