He started his training in the late 1980's at the Weald and Downland Museum on the reconstruction of the early C17th Reigate house.

The book comes satisfyingly full circle to the sarsen stones of Salisbury Plain where it begins with Andrew spending a fitful night in a long barrow near Stonehenge. He concludes: “Stone as a material has allowed the meaning of these monuments to the dead to endure beyond their time. As I have attempted to negotiate my own understanding of the past, I am left touched with the notion that every building, sculpture and structure I have seen in my journey was created by people who felt and thought in a way that was familiar to us, a thread of connection and culture that in some way will continue to run on through the generations.” Howse, Christopher (5 April 2020). "The Stonemason by Andrew Ziminski, review: prepare to be astonished by these tales". The Daily Telegraph. Like nurses, masons must know in detail about the lives of the buildings they care for. This intimate knowledge has given Andrew Ziminski unique insights into some of England's oldest and most beautiful structures. But this book is as much about people as mortar and stone. It's a conversation with the past, from which I learnt so much. My book of the year!, Disappointingly, however, these kinds of details are very much a lesser objective of the book. Most of the book, it seems to me, is less about the nature of stonemasonry as it is of architecture. Or more specifically, architecture as it interacts with stonemasonry. Further, the whole is glued together with an extensive and rather rambling dialog/travelogue as Ziminski travels around southwest England, the area known as the old kingdom of Wessex. While I am myself a lover of small boats, I was more than a little nonplussed that almost as much prose was taken up by his canoe (some of the travel was by river and stream) as any discussion of stoneworking tools and methods. a b Mount, Harry (7 March 2020). "Carve his name with pride: Andrew Ziminsky rebuilds the West Country". The Spectator.Work to restore the Cascade and Serpentine Lake at Prior Park Landscape Garden in Bath, for the National Trust. Having spent five years writing the book he then spent a few weeks carving the cover, hand cutting the title and carving the whippet and some ferns beside water into Bath Stone. The publishers have complemented that work by giving the cover a texture reminiscent of stone. People have been working stone for thousands of year in this country, though how they did it without metal tools is another mystery. Andrew Ziminski has got three decades of experience as a mason and it is with the Neolithic that he begins his journey around the South West of the country, beginning in the West Kennet Long Barrow on the festival of Samhain. He was there to see if the collapsing walls could be repaired, and it was an opportunity to see how our ancient relatives built these structures without metal tools to dress the stones. He wanted to write the book because he felt there was a gap in literature of writing by artisans. “Working people don’t really write books,” he says. “People aren’t interested in their opinions, but with The Stonemason they seem to be... I have done my job.”

He has worked on a wide range of monuments. From the earliest surviving structure in England -The West Kennet Long Barrow to the Roman Baths in Bath and so on through countless Medieval Churches and Cathedrals to the monuments of the Industrial Revolution. It did exactly the same job as the war memorial in Frome. It's about a community coming together to mourn those who have passed, and a focal point for that society. Adjacent to stonemason Andrew Ziminski’s end-of-terrace stone cottage is the parcel of land where he has his open-air workshop. As he stands at his outdoor workbench, he can survey the stone crosses high up on neighbouring Trinity Church that he himself repaired. They are just the nearest example of his stone conservation work, which can be found across the south-west of England and beyond. When I visit, he bravely lets me do a little stone-carving of my own. With a mallet and a little claw chisel, I chip away in a curve to help emphasise the sinuous outline of a reclining woman. It’s a design in Bath stone Ziminski is working on for a famous client he asks me not to name.Although he grew up in Reigate, stonemason Andrew Ziminski rarely works in the South East, where chalk and flint dominate. Walking the fields as a boy he found a neolithic flint axe. And today in his house in Frome, Somerset, he hands it to me and it's cold and heavy with time. He says honing the craft of writing was like learning stonemasonry and he started hesitantly. The first chapter took him a year to write and repeatedly re-write. The final chapter was finished in three weeks and did not change much from the original draft. Ziminski felt that books by historians and academics never quite got to the nub of what life was like for ordinary people, but there is little very ordinary about him. In his garden is a swimming pond he built himself, and one of the legs of his outdoor workshop houses a bottle of Pernod for dispensing post-winter-swim warming shots. It's out here that he does his thinking and experimenting. The publication of my textbook How to Swing in Musical Theatre, projected for the end of the year, will share a career’s worth of practical experience and a decade of research with its readers to bring structure and awareness to the most underestimated job in musical theatre. Swings are an integral part of the day-to-day running of musicals, required to perform regularly, in a variety of different roles to cover any number of cast absences. Characteristically, their workload is boundless and everchanging, which is largely to blame for a near total absence of educational material.