Heinrich & Palmer’s Hull Maritime Waymarkers
Carving memory into Carrara marble
Some artworks do not simply occupy a place. They help us read it.
The waymarkers connect Hull’s maritime heritage with the renewed public realm around Queen’s Gardens and Guildhall Road.
Along Guildhall Road in Hull, a series of six maritime-inspired waymarkers invites visitors to pause, look closely, and reconnect with the city’s long relationship with the water. Designed by artists Anna Heinrich & Leon Palmer for the Hull Maritime project, the works translate fragments of Hull’s seafaring heritage into sculptural forms: part marker, part map, part memory.
For stoneCIRCLE, the project was a compelling meeting point of public art, heritage, digital technology and traditional stonemasonry. It posed a deceptively simple question: how can historical objects held in a museum collection be transformed into tactile stone pieces for the public realm?
The answer began with research, scanning and digital modelling. It ended with Carrara marble being CNC-cut, hand-finished and set into Hull’s streetscape.
A city shaped by the sea
Hull Maritime is a £70 million heritage-led project, funded by Hull City Council and The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Its ambition is to transform six historic sites and two ships in Hull city centre, including refurbishing the Grade II Hull Maritime Museum and Dock Office Chambers, restoring the Arctic Corsair and Spurn Lightship, and renewing the interpretation of South Blockhouse and the Guildhall Time Ball. The project aims to create one of the best maritime experiences outside London.
A carved Carrara marble topstone, developed from 3D scans of artefacts in the Hull Maritime Museum collection.
The timing could hardly be more fitting. Hull has been named among National Geographic’s Top 25 global destinations to visit in 2026, recognising the city’s 800-year maritime heritage and the transformation of its key cultural sites, due to be completed in 2026.
Within this larger civic and cultural undertaking, Heinrich & Palmer were appointed in 2019 to create new work that gives voice to Hull’s maritime past, present and future. Their commission was part of a wider team that included a number of other creatives, Purcell Architects, Southern Green Landscape Architects, Haley Sharpe Design and art consultant Hazel Colquhoun.
From museum artefact to public artwork
Anna Heinrich & Leon Palmer have worked collaboratively for more than three decades. Their practice is site-specific and research-led, often combining installation, large-scale projection, film, photography and sound. For Hull Maritime, their process began with the museum collection itself.
Before the refurbishment of Hull Maritime Museum, selected artefacts were scanned at high resolution. The resulting data formed the basis for new films, interpretation panels and a series of sculptural landscape interventions along the edges of Queen’s Gardens.
Heinrich & Palmer’s models imagined scanned maritime artefacts as if embedded within fictional topographies inspired by Hull’s riverscapes.
The six waymarkers are based on the form of the original dock bollards of Queen’s Dock. The dock was filled in during the 1930s to create Queen’s Gardens, yet some of the original bollards remain visible along the site’s northern boundary. This historical continuity gives the new works a quiet strength: they are contemporary pieces yet rooted in the physical memory of the former dock.
The waymarkers incorporate forms derived from Hull Maritime Museum artefacts, including a ship’s bell, octant, figurehead, ship’s wheel, half-hull model and ceramic fish.
Each Carrara marble topstone incorporates forms derived from 3D laser scans of maritime artefacts from the museum collection. These include the octant from the Truelove, a ship’s bell from the Lord Lovat, a figurehead from the Sirius, a ship’s wheel, a half hull model and a ceramic fish. Heinrich & Palmer modelled these objects as though embedded within fictional topographies inspired by Hull’s riverscapes.
The result is not a literal reproduction of the objects, but something more evocative: a landscape of traces, impressions and remembered forms. The artefacts appear to rise from, or sink into, the stone surface, as if maritime history has become part of the city’s geology.
Translating digital models into stone
For stoneCIRCLE, fabricating the marble topstones brought together the disciplines that define much of our work: technical precision, material understanding and hand craftsmanship.
Based on Heinrich & Palmer’s 3D models, the forms were CNC-cut from Carrara marble in our Basingstoke factory. CNC technology enabled the complex contours, reliefs and embedded forms to be carved with a level of accuracy that would be extremely difficult to achieve by hand.
But this was never a purely mechanical process.
As with much of the most interesting contemporary stonework, the machine was only part of the story. Once the carving was complete, the pieces were hand-finished by our masons, refining the surfaces and ensuring that the final topstones retained the sensitivity required for public artwork.
This balance between digital fabrication and hand-finishing is particularly important in projects of this nature. The scanned artefacts carried historical and cultural meaning. The artists’ models introduced interpretation and imagination. The marble added permanence, tactility and weight. Our task was to preserve the integrity of all three.
Collaboration in the public realm
At stoneCIRCLE factory in Basingstoke, the Hull Maritime waymarkers are ready to be shipped.
The fabrication of the waymarkers was carried out by stoneCIRCLE in collaboration with Broadmead Topstone, which supplied the bases. The final works were installed on site by the main contractor, CR Reynolds.
Public art depends on this kind of collaboration. An idea must pass through many hands before it becomes part of the built environment: artists, clients, consultants, fabricators, contractors and installers. Each stage brings its own constraints and responsibilities. Each decision shapes how the work will be experienced by the public for years to come.
In this case, the finished waymarkers are both intimate and civic. Their scale invites close viewing, while their location connects them to a wider pedestrian route and the renewed cultural landscape around Queen’s Gardens and Guildhall Road.
They are markers of direction, but also of attention. They ask us to look down, to read the surface, and to recognise that the city’s maritime past is not confined to museum displays. It is present in streets, routes, objects, materials and memories.
Heinrich & Palmer’s digital models were translated into Carrara marble through CNC carving by stoneCIRCLE.
Stone as a vessel for memory
Carrara marble has long been associated with sculpture, craft and endurance. In the Hull Maritime waymarkers, it becomes a vessel for scanned data, artistic interpretation and civic storytelling.
This is what makes the project so compelling for the Stonework Chronicles series. It shows how contemporary stonework can serve heritage without lapsing into nostalgia. It shows how CNC technology can extend the possibilities of public art while still relying on the judgment and touch of skilled masons. And it reminds us that stone, even when shaped by advanced digital processes, remains a deeply human material.
For stoneCIRCLE, it was a privilege to help realise Heinrich & Palmer’s vision: to take fragments of Hull’s maritime collection and transform them into carved topographies that now belong to the city’s public realm.
The waymarkers stand as quiet anchors along Guildhall Road. They are small monuments to movement, navigation and memory, and to the enduring relationship between a city and the sea.
At stoneCIRCLE, digital fabrication and traditional hand skills worked together to preserve the artists’ concept's sensitivity.
project details
artists: Anna Heinrich & Leon Palmer
commissioned by: Hull Maritime, Hull City Council
client / project: Hull Maritime
funded by: Hull City Council and The National Lottery Heritage Fund
stone fabrication: stoneCIRCLE
bases: Broadmead Topstone
installation: CR Reynolds
artist website: https://www.heinrichpalmer.co.uk
Hull Maritime: https://maritimehull.co.uk
photos courtesy of Heinrich & Palmer, Tom Arran Photography, Marco Joe Fazio Creatives
video & editorial: Marco Joe Fazio Creatives
