Concrete Products

Concrete is the modern building material without which our city skyscrapers, bridges and sports arenas would not exist. But it has been around for ages, in less reliable forms, as a substitute for heavy, hard to shape stone. By mixing together certain types of gravel and sand with heated limestone and water, ancient civilisations discovered that the result set as hard as stone, and could be controlled and formed by their imaginations.

Concrete is made from sand, gravel and cement, cement being a mixture of various minerals, which when mixed with water, hydrate (set hard via chemical reaction) binding the sand and gravel into one solid mass. Although it’s been around for thousands of years, modern concrete can mark its birth date as 1824, when Portland cement was invented. By mixing clay and limestone in a kiln, a fine powder was produced that when mixed with sand and gravel resembled Portland stone, a white-grey stone which was used to build St Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace.

Concrete is everywhere around your home, from the steps up to your house, to your driveway and footpath – you are going to encounter it every day in some form. Usually delivered to construction sites in elephant-sized agitators to stop the mixture setting, there are now services that will deliver concrete to you for mixing on site in small quantities. So if you want to lay a small path between the laundry and the back door, or lay in a retaining wall for the pool, you don’t have to order a ton of concrete, you get enough bags to get your job done.

There has been no looking back for concrete since its modern development. The strongest building material, concrete has found major uses in dams, highways, buildings and many different kinds of building and construction. It’s even been adopted as the favourite material of some modernist architects – proving that concrete can be beautiful.