Meet the young craftsmen future proofing York Minister

mallets and chisels to coax the stone into shape. Other stonemasons are in full flow and there is a rhythmic quality to their chipping and bashing. The sound of stone being hit is unexpectedly musical. “Yeah, you can have a little groove to it,” Gee says, laughing.

Many of his workmates wear headphones and Gee, who is 19 and halfway through his four-year apprenticeship at the stoneyard, often listens to podcasts, a nice modern touch to keeping alive an old tradition.

The block he is shaping is destined for the South Quire Transept on the right side of St Cuthbert’s Window.

Gee has handled stone from a young age. His father restores old buildings, and Gee was in and out of cathedrals as a child. When he was five, the family moved from Dorset to Italy, living in Anghiari, a small hill town in Tuscany, a short

drive from Florence, Siena and Assisi, an area with no shortage of fine buildings needing loving attention.

In 2012 the family moved back to Lyme Regis, where his father won the contract to conserve the Cobb, the Grade I-listed old stone harbour wall, and a young Charlie helped with that job.

Stonemasons today work by hand, much as their medieval forebears did, although the blocks are sawn by machine before the painstaking chiselling begins. One philosophical difference is that they know what they are working on, whereas their medieval cousins laid the stones for a great edifice that they would never see completed.

“Sometimes I look up at the Minster, and as a stonemason you know how much it takes to work on each individual piece,” says Gee. “I look up and think of each individual mason who’s worked on each block that’s gone into the Minster. And it’s just incredible the amount of work there.”

After school, he went to Weymouth College, one of a few to offer stonemasonry as a subject. The college is close to where Portland stone comes from, and that prized stone is much like the block that he is shaping now.