Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2.1
Brick, solid
This chapter deals with all kinds of
fired clay facing materials, including
brick and terracotta (but excluding
tiles), normally encountered in solid
walls. Concrete and calcium silicate
bricks more usually found in the
outer leaves of cavity walls are dealt
with in Chapter 2.2.
Clay facing brickwork needs no
words of introduction.
Terracotta is a fired clay material
which can be modelled into units of
different forms and patterns, and
which may or not be glazed; the
glazed material is also known as
faience. There was much mystique
about its manufacture, with some
recipes being closely guarded
secrets.
Although brickwork was used
extensively in Roman times, it was
not until the end of the thirteenth
century that brickwork in England
began to be used on a limited scale
using bricks imported from the Low
Countries. Tudor and Jacobean times,
though, saw a massive increase in its
use (Figure 2.2).
Since then it has maintained its
popularity for buildings of all kinds.
It is reported that in England, around
one third of all dwellings still have
solid masonry walls as their
predominant structure. The older the
property, the more likely it is to have
solid masonry walls, with nearly two
thirds of all dwellings built before
1918 having solid walls. (The
EHCS
(2)
does not distinguish
between brick and stone.) With
respect to other building types, the
change from solid to cavity
construction took place over
approximately the same time scale,
though there is an increasing
possibility that some solid walls are
thicker than one brick.
So far as Scotland is concerned, of
all dwellings, nearly three quarters
have cavity walls and the remainder
solid, with brick-and-block two
thirds, sandstone around 1 in 5, whin
or granite 1 in 25 and most of the
small remainder non-traditional
(3)
.
Characteristic details
Basic structure
Bricks
The brick is designed as a unit which
can be laid with one hand by the
bricklayer, and at the same time laid
in courses to produce walls of
varying thicknesses. Bricks have
been manufactured from an
enormous variety of clay bodies, and
the resulting properties of the fired
product have been equally varied.
Clay types include the brick
earths, for example, which produce
the London Stocks; Tertiary and
Cretaceous which produce the Gaults
and the Wealdens; Jurassic which
produce the Flettons; and Triassic
(Keuper marl), Palaeozoic (Permian)
and Carboniferous clays. A full
description of the estimated 2,000 or
more different brick types available
at the height of brick production -
some eight billion per annum - in the
middle of the twentieth century from
over 1,000 different brickworks, is to
be found in
Clay building bricks of
the United Kingdom
(83)
.
The range of manufactured types
was equally vast: common, facing or
engineering, extruded or wirecut,
semi-dry or stiff plastic pressed with
or without frog, horizontally or
Figure 2.2
Double Flemish bond brickwork, Middle
Temple, London
