Aycliffe Today Business Aycliffe Today Business Issue 42 | Page 25

The magazine for Aycliffe Business Park | 25
Stiller helps to
relocate unique
piece of cathedral
for good cause
Aycliffe firm Stiller helped to
relocate this ancient stone
from Durham Cathedral.
S
tiller Warehousing and Distribution has
helped to relocate a historic – and very
heavy – stone from Durham Cathedral
for a good cause.
One of the highest stones from Durham
Cathedral’s tower now has a new home at
Learning Curve Group (LCG) in Durham Gate,
Spennymoor.
LCG successfully bid for the 150-year-
old stone during the North East England
Chamber of Commerce’s annual dinner in
2018, paying £6,500.
This amount was part of £75,000 raised
at the NEECC last year, added by a further
£154,000 raised at the 2019 dinner in
September – totalling nearly £230,000 raised
from the two NEECC dinners which will go
towards the cathedral’s restoration.
The painstaking job of transporting and
installing the stone safely at its new home
at the entrance of LCG’s Durham Gate office
was undertaken by Aycliffe-based Stiller, who
offered to deliver the stone free of charge at
the event and carried out their promise.
Stiller’s business development manager
Thomas Prentice is pictured above (far left)
delivering the stone to LCG’s premises.
Matthew Kirk, Durham Cathedral
relationship and development manager,
said: “We were thrilled when LCG won this
fabulous stone at last year’s Chamber annual
dinner auction at the Cathedral.
“For the past three years we’ve been
removing and replacing a number of stones
from the Cathedral’s tower and this stone
was one of the finest we removed.
“We are glad to know this stone which has
stood guard over Durham for over 150 years
will have a new life welcoming people to the
LCG building.
“LCG’s bid will contribute to the repair
and maintenance of the Cathedral for many
years to come. Not only have they bought a
little piece of Durham history but they’ve also
helped safeguard the future.”
Daniel Marsden-Knight, Chamber events
and development manager, said: “It is a
tremendous privilege for us to be able to
hold our annual dinner in Durham Cathedral,
part of the country’s most iconic world
heritage sites.
razorblue drives
logistics firm Stiller’s
digital transformation
L
eading logistics provider Stiller
Warehousing and Distribution has
made the move to the cloud with
a fully-managed solution from award-
winning IT specialists razorblue.
With multiple on-premise servers
reaching end-of-life, Stiller evaluated the
marketplace before deciding to transition
their on-site servers to razorblue’s cloud
platform.
The migration sees Aycliffe-based
Stiller’s data located within razorblue’s
UK data centres which eliminates the
requirement for up-front expenditure
and provides built-in backup and disaster
recovery.
The razorblue platform enables Stiller
to scale up and down as required to meet
their needs.
The migration took place outside of
Stiller’s core working hours to avoid
disruption and was seamlessly executed
by razorblue engineers on site.
“The partnership between the Chamber
and the Cathedral is fantastic for our
members who attend the unique event and
are also proud to know they are supporting
its restoration at the same time.”
The stone, which now sits pride of place at
LCG’s head office, is an open tracery upper
course stone and was the top of one of the
crenels, the highest point on the cathedral
tower. Open tracery is a style of carving
which means the decoration is visible from
the outside of the stone.
The decoration is a double quatrefoil –
the four points in the inner arch are the
‘quatrefoil’ creating a clover like decoration.
Brought from Prudham Quarry in 1859, the
stone was put on the tower in approximately
1860. It was removed from the tower during
the first phase of recent renovations with the
other upper course tracery stones.
Stiller managing
director
Matthew Stiller
with razorblue
CEO Dan
Kitchen (right).
razorblue CEO Dan Kitchen said:
“More businesses are recognising
the benefits of migrating to the
cloud, such as availability and
scalability, as well as predictable
costs in an unpredictable economic
climate.
“Stiller have much more resilience now
than they did previously with their data
stored on site and have full control of the
solution internally with additional assurance
that razorblue will provide a fully-managed
support service 24/7.”
Stiller managing director Matthew Stiller,
pictured with Kitchen, added: “Having
worked with razorblue for the past two
years, we are pleased to extend our
partnership across more of their services.
“Moving to the cloud has alleviated
many of our business challenges, enabling
us to consistently deliver outstanding
service to our customers.
“I was very impressed with the
professionalism of razorblue’s engineers
and their proactive approach to the project.”
razorblue specialises in managed IT
and cybersecurity services, super-fast
connectivity, cloud hosting and business
software solutions – across a broad range
of industries, working with major retailers,
manufacturers, professional services
businesses and hotels.
The firm was launched in 2006 by
Kitchen from his family home when he was
just 17. After quitting college he grew the
company, which moved to its headquarters
in Catterick in 2009.
The company now employs over 80 staff
across offices in Wynyard, Catterick, Leeds,
Manchester and London and boasts several
multi-million pound contracts.