The Collaborative International Dictionary
Portland stone \Port"land stone"\ A yellowish-white calcareous freestone from the Isle of Portland in England, much used in building.
Wikipedia
Portland stone is a limestone from the Tithonian stage of the Jurassic period quarried on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. The quarries consist of beds of white-grey limestone separated by chert beds. It has been used extensively as a building stone throughout the British Isles, notably in major public buildings in London such as St Paul's Cathedral and Buckingham Palace. It is also exported to many countries—Portland stone is used in the United Nations headquarters building in New York City, for example.
Usage examples of "portland stone".
The curtain walls of Tilbury Fort, to the east and west bastions, were built on arched counter forts, solidly constructed of Portland stone.
It had been built in white Portland stone, which had, before it was even completed, begun to turn black from the soot and the filth in the smoky London air and now, following the cleaning of London in the 1970s, was more or less white again.
Copper strips were buried in the rubble beneath the Portland stone facing, and the strengthening chants which long dead workmen had infused into them had to be exposed.
Red brick banded with white Portland stone gave it a picturesque charm, and the rounded turrets at each corner suggested a baronial castle.
Not only did Jack Aubrey love hunting the fox, but he was persuaded that he was as good a judge of horseflesh as any man in the Navy List, and when he came home from the Mauritius campaign deep-laden with prize-money he laid out a noble yard with a double coach-house and accommodation for hacks and hunters on one side and a range of loose-boxes to house the beginnings of a racing-stable on the other, with tack-rooms at the short ends, forming an elegant quadrangle of rosy brick trimmed with Portland stone and crowned by a tower with a blue-dialled clock in it.
A neo-Georgian building of dull red brick with Portland stone, it dated from the early Thirties and followed the design that the government then favored for Britain's telephone exchanges.
Towers, spires, and facades of Portland stone were white or pink against the dimming sky.