Book Review: The Bricks of Victorian London

摘要

This is a really impressive book. It extends considerably the scope of previously published studies - which are generally confined to single enterprises - by examining the structure and operation of a broad swath of the industry. The fact that it focuses on our largest city during a period of exceptional growth in the number and variety of brickmaking businesses adds considerably to its interest and importance. It presents a detailed examination of the industry's rise to the challenge of making bricks on the scale needed for London's development; it deals with the organisation of the industry, the technology behind London brickmaking, the ownership and development of the brickfields, and the lives of the brickyard labourers and their families. The importance of brickmaking and brick structures to the growth and prosperity of nineteenth-century Britain is indisputable. London, like other British cities, required bricks by the million for workers' houses, for factories, mills and other industrial buildings, and for infrastructure projects such as docks, railways and sewers. Fortunately, the raw materials for brickmaking on a large scale were readily accessible, and for the most part the capital's unprecedented demand for bricks was met locally. Readers of this journal will be aware that brickmaking in nineteenth-century London had some distinctive features. For one thing, clamps remained in common use for burning bricks at most of the city's brickworks long after they were generally superseded elsewhere by kilns. But the most striking difference lies in the preparation of the clay before moulding. As the author has described elsewhere, ashes from domestic grates were added in large quantities to the local clay or brick earth along with chalk." The partially burned fine ash, known at the time as 'Spanish', reduced fuel consumption when the bricks were fired and helped create the tough yellow-grey London stock brick which was widely used throughout the city. Hounsell describes in detail how the ashes were collected, stored and then sifted to separate the components of value to the brickmaker. At one time this was a remarkably large and profitable business. (The author draws on material previously considered in his book, 'London's Rubbish' (Amberley, 2014), and quotes extensively from authors of the period, notably Dickens).