At Home - Bill Bryson [108]
Domestically, stone was hardly used at all until the eighteenth century, but then it caught on fast, even for simple buildings like cottages. Unfortunately, large areas outside the limestone belt had no local stone, and this included the most important and building-hungry place of all: London. The environs of London did, however, hold huge reserves of iron-rich clay, and so the city rediscovered an ancient building material: brick. Bricks have been around for at least six thousand years, though in Britain they date only from Roman times, and Roman bricks were not actually very good. For all their other building skills, the Romans lacked the ability to fire bricks in a way that would allow big ones to be baked all the way through, so they made thinner bricks which were more like tiles. After the Romans departed, bricks fell out of use in England for the better part of a thousand years.
Bricks began to appear in some English buildings by about 1300, but for the next two hundred years native skills were so lacking that it remained usual to bring in Dutch brickmakers and bricklayers when building a brick house. As a home-produced building material, brick came into its own in the time of the Tudors. Many of the great brick buildings like Hampton Court Palace date from this period. Bricks had one great advantage: they could frequently be made on-site. The moats and ponds that we associate with Tudor manor houses often denote where clay was dug out to be made into brick. But bricks had drawbacks, too. To create a decent brick, the brickmaker had to get every stage exactly right. He had first to mix carefully two or more types of clay to ensure the right consistency to prevent warping and shrinkage when fired. The prepared clay was then formed into brick shapes in molds, which had to be air-dried for two weeks. Finally, the bricks were stacked and fired in an oven. If any of these stages was flawed—if the moisture content was too high or the heat of the kiln not exactly right—the result was imperfect bricks. And imperfect bricks were common. So bricks in medieval and Renaissance Britain had a high prestige value. They were novel and stylish and generally only appeared in the smartest and most important structures.
Perhaps the greatest demonstration of the difficulty of making bricks—or possibly just the greatest demonstration of single-minded futility—was in the 1810s when Sydney Smith, the well-known wit and cleric, decided to make his own bricks for the rectory he was building for himself at Foston le Clay in Yorkshire. He was said to have unsuccessfully fired 150,000 bricks before finally conceding that he probably wasn’t going to get the hang of it.
The golden age of English brick was the century from 1660 to 1760. “Nowhere in the world can more beautiful brickwork be seen than in the best English examples of this age,” Ronald Brunskill and Alec Clifton-Taylor write in their definitive book, English Brickwork. A big part of the beauty of bricks of this period was their subtle lack of uniformity. Because it was impossible to make really uniform ones, bricks were of a lovely range of hues—from pinkish red to deepest plum. Minerals in the clay give bricks their color, and the predominance of iron in most soil types accounts for the disproportionate weighting toward red. The classic London yellow stock bricks, as they are known, take their color from the presence of chalk in the soil. White bricks (which aren’t actually white at all, but a creamy yellow)