Bricks

Your choice of brick may be determined in part by your style of house and in part by the local vernacular, which the planners are often keen to promote. But brick manufacturers all produce a wide range of bricks and you are likely to be able to find a suitable brick from a number of different sources.

Because the end product can be so similar, the process of selecting bricks can be quite daunting and there are a number of businesses which specialise in matching clients with bricks. These brick factors, as they are known, may be embedded within well-known builders’ merchant chains or may operate independently, but the process they draw you through is much the same.

First they try to tease out your requirements – size of order, style of brick, approximate price range – then they steer you towards a series of panels which often have nondescript names like ‘Autumn Gold’ or ‘Mellow Red’. Now it may be that there are five or six manufacturers that produce a brick which would fit this bill, so the brick factor holds considerable sway over where the order is eventually placed, and the manufacturers are known to offer brick factors large commissions for placing work their way.

It pays to be a little flexible about your choice of brick. If you select a specific range from a specific manufacturer early on in the process, you may find that your first point of contact establishes the price you will have to pay and that all other potential suppliers will be effectively priced out of the deal. This practice, known as ‘site covering’ or ‘registration’, has been widespread in the past and moves are afoot to outlaw it; but it is as well to be aware of it. The chances are that if your site is covered like this, you will end up paying up to £30 per thousand more for your bricks to cover the commission.

Bricks are conventionally sold by the thousand. There is, as you might expect, a wide range of prices. Commons and engineering bricks are widely available at less than £200  per thousand, stock bricks tend to cost between £250 and £400 per thousand, and handmades and reclaimed bricks can be £800 per thousand upwards.

A HISTORY OF BRICKS

Brick is one of the oldest building materials known to man. There are examples of sun-dried mud bricks (adobe) surviving from Iraq and Turkey, which have been dated back to 7000BC, and artificially fired bricks, as we use them in Britain, appear in the same area by 3000BC. The practice of making fired-clay bricks spread around Europe with the Roman empire and never seems to have gone away.

In the UK, brick became the ubiquitous building material of the industrial revolution and huge numbers of muchloved brick buildings survive from the Georgian and Victorian periods.Where they differ from today’s construction method is that the walls were built using solid brickwork, rather than cavity walls, which were an innovation of the 20th century.

The colour of clay bricks is dictated by the chemical and mineral content of the raw materials and the firing temperature in the kiln. Pink-coloured bricks result from a high iron content, whilst white or yellow bricks have a high lime content. Most bricks burn to various red hues and, as the temperature increases, the colour moves through dark red, then purple and finally to brown or grey at around 1,300°C.

HOW MANY BRICKS DO I NEED?

Most bricks made for the British market are a uniform metric size, being 65mm high,215mm long and 100mm wide. The logicbehind these dimensions is that bricks are laidin 10mm mortar beds, so each brick courseis 75mm high — a good old imperial three inches. Brick buildings are traditionally set outin 75mm-high increments, so that windowsand doors are always made in multiples of 75mm. The length of a brick is not quite sucha simple idea to grasp, but if you place four of them in a row, each separated by a mortar joint, the resulting 900mm length is very close to an imperial yard.

A square metre of face brickwork contains around 60 bricks, and this is the key constant used to calculate the number of bricks needed for a single-skin or stretcher bond wall. The brick wall area can be calculated off plan, with allowances made for openings for doors and windows, and additional calculations taking into account features such as fireplaces.

QUANTITY ISSUES

There is no industry standard as to how bricks should be sold but generally they are now shrink-wrapped in plastic, which keeps them dry, and packed in lots of 400 or 410, whicheasily fits onto a pallet. One of these packs weighs around one tonne and they are routinelydelivered on 20-tonne lorries, which will thus be around 8,000 bricks. Once your order exceeds half a lorry load, it is more than likely that it will be shipped direct to you from the factory and not via the builders’ merchant.

It makes sense to order in complete packs and also to find out how the bricks are packed. Some are placed on wooden pallets but more usually they are put together with two holes near the base of each pack, which are designed to take the forks of a forklift.

TYPES OF BRICKS

• Stocks
  A traditional-looking brick with a slightly irregular shape. Stocks are made by using a moulding process. The effect is to get a brick that simulates the look and feel of a handmade brick but at a much keener price.
• Extruded or wire-cut
  Extruding and wire-cutting are cheaper processes than moulding and the resultant brick tends to have a more industriallooking finish, though the surface can be textured or sanded to add visual interest.
• Tumbled
  An alternative method of adding visual appeal to wire-cuts is to roll the bricks in a drum to give a distressed appearance. Hence the common name ‘tumbled’.
• Flettons or commons
  Generally the cheapest brick available, made from deposits of Oxford clay that require relatively little firing. Not often used on face work these days, but can be useful to matchexisting brickwork or in below-ground work.
• Handmade
  There are a number of small producers of handmade bricks dotted around the country, often catering for prestigious local projects or sensitive restoration work. As you might expect, handmade bricks are the most expensive you can buy, but they are also the most visually appealing.
• Engineering bricks
  These are particularly hard-wearing and strong. They offer much greater structural support (and are thus a natural choice for supporting steel beams) and they are also extremely moisture-resistant. This second quality, combined with some very low prices, has seen engineering bricks being widely used as a damp-proof course.
• Specials
  This is the term given to bricks that aren’t a standard rectangular box shape. These get used, typically, on details like cills and brick wall cappings where you want to stop rainwater pooling.

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