The Virtual Geoscience Workbench for discontinuous systems, i.e. particulate, granular, blocky, fracturing and fragmenting systems, is a computer software environment for modelling. VGW is a collaborative 5-year project funded by EPSRC and is under development on two sites, Imperial College London (PI: Dr J-P. Latham) and Queen Mary, University of London (PI: Prof A Munjiza, see also Virtual Experimentation Lab). We take the view that a single general-purpose discrete element program is unlikely to be robust for handling all particulate systems and we have made the combined Finite-Discrete Element Method (FEMDEM) pioneered by Munjiza in the 1990s the core of our solids technology. FEMDEM is especially well suited to irregular geometry with deforming and fracturing behaviour. A considerable effort within the VGW research programme on the IC site has been directed towards coupling the solids modelling part with a generic adaptive unstructured meshing cfd code "Fluidity" developed within our department’s AMCG research group, AMCG Wiki thus opening the door to important multi-physics applications. See for example our work in Coastal Structures.