The Joy of Bricks

One of my more unusual recent jobs in a task-driven life was to find and clean a spare house brick, wrap it and post it to East Sussex.  The original lime mortar came off very easily and the traces could be removed with a damp cloth. This brought to mind Alec Clifton Taylor: there are other enthusiastic writers about bricks but appreciation rings out in his 1962 classic, The Pattern of English Building. He lays out the history and variety of bricks, the skills of the itinerant brick maker, especially in firing, and the glorious flowering of brick building under the Tudors. This sustained burst of development had much to do with the relative political stability after the Wars of the Roses, giving the nobility and squirearchy confidence of to invest in enclosures and highly profitable sheep farming. They and successful merchants and financiers built new houses or new wings on existing houses. It is perhaps no coincidence that the fortunes of what became the Duchy of Devonshire were established in this period, by Sir William Cavendish in recognition of assisting Henry VIII to raise money from the dissolution of the monasteries. He married Bess of Hardwick and they were both great builders of houses.

The Romans were great brick makers and began to fire bricks (as opposed to drying them in the sun) under The Empire, favouring a larger but shallower brick than is now usual in Britain. The 'average' Roman brick was around 18 inches long and 12 inches broad and perhaps a little over 2 inches deep but there were many variations in shape and size. The skills and practice spread through the Empire and a few Roman brick structures remain in England. Unfortunately the skills died out when the Romans left in the Fifth Century and seem to have been reintroduced by Flemish craftsmen: the earliest medieval examples are all around Colchester. There was migration to East Anglia from the Low Countries in addition to substantial imports of finished bricks.

In Lancashire, where we live currently, there was some local brick making in the 16th and 17th centuries and this expanded rapidly to support the industrial revolution, particularly after 1850 when the Brick Tax was abolished. Many later spinning mills and weaving sheds were of mainly brick construction with Welsh slate roofs. Distribution of these materials became much more widespread by canal and, later, by railway, allowing areas with high quality fire clay deposits to specialise in brick production. As the mills increased in height the increased structural loads demanded bricks of higher compressive strength. In some early mills bricks were of inconsistent quality, leading to some structural failures, partly as a result of extrapolating traditional barn building techniques beyond their reasonable limits but also because of the urgency. The enterprises were so profitable that some new mills could pay back the investment within as little as four years, with huge profits to be made beyond that time.

It is this newer type of machine-made, dense, high-strength engineering brick that I posted off today.

Woods Brothers of Blackburn produced a hard, dense, Accrington-type brick and it was employed for as the facing brick for the flank and rear cavity wall elevations when our house was built, originally as a baker's shop, in 1905. Prof. Duncan Philips put out a recent appeal for historic brick samples on the RICS Building Conservation Forum and welcomed my offer to send him one of these for the collection of historic bricks that he is putting together. The receipt shows that it weighs 4.533 kilos (they are very dense and slightly larger than average UK brick size) and the postage cost was £12.98! I wish him luck with his collection. He practises as listedbuildingsurveys.co.uk and is a Chartered Environmentalist as well as Chartered Building Surveyor.