Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
and tubular steel scaffolding replaced timber. Site congestion reduced exten-
sive on-site workshops such as the bricklayer's cutting-shed.
Architectural changes reflected social responses about how future hous-
ing should be built, responding to the alarming findings on the overall level
of poor health of the nation's young men when conscription started in 1916.
Inadequate and inferior housing was held largely to blame, and the resultant
Tudor Walters Committee report of 1918, set down minimum standards for
workers' houses constructed during the inter-war period. This served as the
foundation for other standards for a long time after.
Externally, structural brickwork reflected these changing times. Though
solid-wall construction dominated, the true cavity wall was increasingly used,
and cement was being added to lime mortar for both increased speed of con-
struction and also additional strength for thinner walls. The general standard
of brickwork achieved was good, and minimal enrichment was entertained
to enliven principal façades, though usually along flat, angular, or recessed
planes. This was achieved by the manipulation of standard bricks, 'creasing
tiles' or, more traditionally, with axed arches of soft stocks neatly finished with
precise, mainly 'weather-struck and cut' pointing.
Regular mechanised bricks on principal façades increasingly removed the
need for the traditional colour washing and tuck pointing, or the precise cut-
ting and rubbing of ashlared gauged work. It became ever more difficult for
the discerning architect to argue in favour of gauged work because the over-
riding aim was to achieve quality of construction, but at minimal cost. When it
was employed, usually for a simple arch, the high standards only a generation
before was increasingly relaxed as a fashion for a wider joint prevailed; perhaps
as a result of the overall loss of those finer skills. This killed off any remaining
remnant of William Morris's ideals of a handcrafted Britain that was viewed by
architects and planners as a luxurious deceit that was simply too expensive.
As Quiney (1986, 145) records:
'The standard cottage will depend for any attraction that it may possess, not upon
the tool marks of the workman, nor upon its peculiarity or idiosyncrasy, nor in a
word upon its individuality', wrote the planner and architect Stanley Adshead in
1916, 'but upon more general characteristics such as suitability to purpose and
excellence of design.'
Some simply disliked the use of gauged brickwork
The Brick Builder
of March
1927 reported (1927, 44):
I hold, for instance, that it is not possible to imagine a kind of bricks nor a
manner of using them more entirely delightful for their purpose than is to be seen
in the elevations of Sir Edwin Lutyens' Midland Bank in Piccadilly. Here, again,
we have bricks; not bits of soap, or blocks of cheese, or nougat or chocolate, but
