From Stoke to Today: How a Garden Festival Helped Shape CED Stone

Post date: 17 Jun, 2026

Forty years on, the Stoke-on-Trent National Garden Festival stands as an important chapter in the story of both CED Stone and British landscaping, helping to shape the industry we know today.

Held in 1986 on the former Shelton steelworks site, the festival was part of a national programme designed to show how landscape, design and public space could help reclaim damaged industrial land and give it a new future. What had once been a major industrial site became a temporary landscape of gardens, paths, planting, water, structures, sculpture and public space.

The National Garden Festivals also played an important role in raising the profile of the landscape industry itself. The idea drew inspiration from the German Bundesgartenschau model, where large-scale garden shows were used as a way of regenerating towns and cities after the war. In the UK, BALI (the British Association of Landscape Industries), was closely connected with the development and promotion of the Garden Festival programme, helping to show the public, government and wider built-environment sector what professional landscaping could achieve.

CED Stone was proud to play a small but meaningful part in that story.

In 1986, Michael Heap led CED's involvement in the Stoke-on-Trent National Garden Festival. Working with BALI, CED provided nineteen different natural stone materials - boulders, rocks, cobbles, pebbles and gravels. These and nothing else were used to create a very attractive design for a spare triangular-shaped space across the front of the four BALI gardens themselves.

That project marked the beginning of CED’s working relationship with BALI. It was a practical contribution, but also a symbolic one: a specialist stone supplier supporting an industry body that was helping to promote landscaping as a serious force in regeneration, placemaking and public life.

The relationship continued. CED’s involvement at Stoke led directly to the company’s work with the beach and stream, the main landscape infrastructure for the Glasgow Garden Festival two years later. Then, to be able to supply the demands of the many international gardens coming to the festival, a holding store was created at Castlecary, later growing into CED Scotland. In 1989, CED supplied materials to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show for the first time. In 1990, CEDEC Footpath Gravel was developed for Canary Wharf, becoming one of the company’s best-known landscape products.

London, Canary Wharf

Looking back now, Stoke-on-Trent feels like one of those quietly important points in CED’s story. It was not just a supply project. It was part of a wider moment when landscape was being used to change perceptions, restore derelict land and create places that people could enjoy.

For CED, it was also the start of a long relationship with BALI and another step towards the specialist natural stone, hard landscaping and public realm supply work that continues today.