Most terrace houses in London dating from before the late nineteenth century incorporate two types of bricks - facing bricks and place bricks The facing bricks, used for the external faces of the front and rear walls, the exposed flank walls and the party walls projecting above the roof, at least from the late seventeenth century, were usually the familiar yellow London stocks, which were known as ordinary grey stocks, sometimes combined with red and/or finer bricks for the arches and jambs of openings. Much has been written about the facing bricks and other visible ornamentation, but this note is about the inferior less costly bricks generally used for backing external walls and for all internal & party walls, known as place bricks, and amounting to about 80% of the total number of bricks in a typical terrace house. To summarise - stocks were used for all the brickwork exposed to view in the finished construction, the remainder were all place bricks.
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