Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Each capital took approximately ten days to carve, after much time had been
spent in setting out to avoid leaving bricks undercut and to ensure that the per-
pends matched on each leaf of the capital.
The article concludes by expressing the following viewpoint:
Whether rubbed work will ever be extensively used again is problematical.
Fashion is unpredictable. There can be little doubt however that for relatively
small areas in the right setting rubbed brickwork has great potentialities. In an
age when so many designers are using drab exterior finishes, despite the wide
variety of coloured materials available, it would be pleasant to see here and there
the splash of strong colour, suitably relieved by carving, which rubbers make
possible.
The building booms in the 1960s and '70s served only to hasten the decline
in the knowledge and practice of traditional skills and when gauged work was
employed, increasingly it was of an inferior quality of workmanship. Houses
designed to be devoid of any form of enrichment built with machine-made
bricks laid in cement:sand mortars, and as quickly and cheaply as possible was
the primary aim. This was accompanied by a massive increase in unqualified
men working as bricklayers and an acceptance - no matter how reluctant - of
the inferior work they inevitably produced.
With sterling work from the Brick Development Association (BDA), particu-
larly through advertising, publication ('Brick is Beautiful') and technical innov-
ations in brick construction, the 1980s saw a reaction to this nadir with more
attractive designs and detailing of buildings with improved ranges of aesthetic-
ally pleasing bricks and special shapes. Gauged work was extremely rare on
new buildings viewed as an old skill, for use only on the repairs to old buildings
and where it was used it was frequently not to the standard of former times. As
a result a great deal of damage, some irreversible, was done to historic gauged
features due to this lack of skill and understanding.
There was still occasional use of skilled gauged work during this period - for
instance, the construction of several large span low rise segmental arches to
enrich the façade on a large office building in Rampayne Street, London SW1.
The bricks used were not authentic red rubbing bricks, but a soft red from the
Milton Hall 'Medium Red' range; now part of Hanson Building Products. These
bricks were delivered ready-cut to the correct voussoir shapes and were skilfully
laid in a lime putty:silver sand joint of 3mm in thickness, by the bricklayers of
Harry Neal Limited, following their careful setting out and laying all vous-
soirs to lines ranged from profile trees. In 1980, at Hampton Court Palace, in
order to match a late seventeenth-century gauged niche that had suffered
extreme erosion, Dove Brothers skilfully built its replacement. Using among the
