On Bricks.

In a comment to my earlier post on the subject of considerable heat beneath the site of a brick-kiln, even several years after it was demolished; Relax Max said:

"I was reading a book recently about the construction of a huge brick hospital in the 1870s and it said all the red bricks were done on-site back then. I guess they just selected a site that had the right kind of clay. Many thousands of bricks. I can't remember how it said they fired them and I can't find the book right now. Today, of course, they would just truck them in. Times change. Here is the building in question. I'll have to look harder and find that book. :)
http://tinyurl.com/yg677co"

Little did he know that he would unleash a post on bricks... quite literally, as you will see later, post, bricks...

I suppose I was interested in bricks, and how things, houses, for instance were made, even before I became a potter and fell in love with the magical transformation of clay when subjected to fire.

As a child, I loved making things, and I'd scoop clay out of the ground, wet it, and model it to make animals, people, buildings, bridges, roads.... and dams, oh yes, dams. on wet days, puddles and clay, what joy. I..... er..still do that, damming streams of rainwater, when I think nobody's looking. I remember hearing the biblical story about the israelites having to make bricks from mud, with straw in them. These were for Rameses the Second's city in 1490 b.c. The Israelites were, (and the archaeological record supports this) deliberately wasting straw, provided for the brick making. Without the fibre reinforcement and water-wicking properties of just the right amount of straw, the fine grained nile clays would crack and distort as they dried, so a certain amount of chopped straw was added. However, archaeologists have found numerous bricks in the region that are effectively just a bundle of straw daubed over with mud. That said, it might have been deliberate, because in the core of a wall, strength could be sacrificed in order to give better insulation. I suppose nobody knows. Anyway, the Pharaoh waxed exceedingly angry and said "Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, Let them go and gather it for their-selves, and the tally of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, Ye shall lay upon them.".

These were unfired bricks, we modern westerners were prone to dismiss them as "mud bricks" as if that made them inferior, but in fact there was nothing inferior about mud, or adobe, especially in a mostly dry climate.

Bricks used to build the ancient city of Jericho, ten thousand years ago, can be found today in as good a condition as when they were new. Their shape is similar to a small loaf of bread, but the size, well that's similar to the size we use today. It's not rocket science. A brick's size has to be so that a man can place it, repeatedly, all day, with one hand. Hence the jericho bricks are about 9"x 3" x 3", our modern ones are mostly 9" x 3" x 4".... Moving on, however, the firing of bricks began about 5,000 years ago, in Iraq. 

The Ishtar Gate, built in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar 604-562 b.c. was one of the earliest great works in fired and glazed brick.(I love that name... my grandfather, when I was about four or five used to teach me silly rhymes "Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Jews, bought his wife a pair of shoes. When the shoes began to wear, Nebuchadnezzar began to swear!")....

Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum, Berlin

 

Detail, Ishtar.

Ishtar Gate Reproduction, Iraq

In Europe, buildings would tend to be made with that which is abundant. In areas of forest, timber houses were predominant, as they are still in many parts of Scandinavia and Russia., timber buildings, however, in cities were vulnerable to fire, and to attackers. So,  where stone was available the wealthier citizens built  with stone. But most countries have areas where there are deep beds of clay and sands, and stone is more costly, having to be transported in. These areas were where the buildings were most often made of brick. European brick-making was strongest in the Low Countries, (Flanders being the centre of the trade) and from the thirteenth century onward, brickmaking became an important part of their economies. Bricks were exported, (over 200,000 bricks were shipped from Ypres for work on the Tower of London in 1278) , but obviously, they were a heavy, and therefore expensive commodity, when shipped far from their site of manufacture, so it became more common for Flemish brick-making crews, whole families, to travel instead, to the customer's site, there to dig clay, mould bricks, and fire them.
They travelled all over europe, and many of them crossed the north sea to britain. Just to the east of where I live, the town of Kingston upon Hull (better known just as 'Hull') became Britain's first all-brick town, even its defensive walls were of brick. Just as Max said all the bricks were made on site. Hull sits at the northern shore of the Humber estuary, on a rich bed of secondary clay. There's nowhere nearby to quarry stone.

Picture from "The Boy's Book of Trades", London, 1871

Soon enough, the knowledge of brickmaking became widespread. Most farms made bricks, often the source of the bricks was left to fill with water and to become a duckpond. These bricks were often rather soft, and underfired, fired in an open stack or "clamp" in which the material being fired formed its own kiln. As we see in Cruickshank's cartoon below.

Cartoon by George Cruickshank, 1829, a protest against the farmlands of Hampstead, north of London, being devoured by the spread of the city, we see bricks bursting from the clamp-kilns, to spring up as new "jerry-built" housing, note the cracks in the walls of the unfinished housing.

Bricks in situ: London is built on a broad expanse of deep clay, and, just as this cartoon depicts, the housing of London was largely formed out of the ground it stood upon. The excavations became cellars. I found an old newspaper for an area of my hometown, advertising in about 1880, building plots close to the railway station saying "The site furnishes good clay for the brick-making, upon a foundation of good sandstone" .

During the 1800s the railways required vast numbers of bricks, one viaduct built in Manchester, over clay ground, has a length of over two miles, and used over fifty million bricks in its construction.

Here in Britain, roads were usually made of broken stone, of "Macadam" construction, (before tar-macadam), but in America, the Dutch settlers built many roads paved with brick. As early as1719 brick sidewalks were being laid in Philadelphia.

And that brings me back to Relax Max's comment. I said I'd write a post on bricks, Post, Bricks, 

well here it is. 

 

This is a Bank, made of Bricks, sent through the Post.

In 1916, Mr W.A Coltharp set out to build a bank in Vernal, Utah, and the bricks he chose were textured bricks made by the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company, some 127 miles away. The cost of transporting those bricks would be tremendous, the wagon and rail journey would total 420 miles, and the quoted cost of transport was three times the cost of the bricks. But Mr Coltharp had a brainwave, USPS's parcel rate would be cheaper! The maximum parcel weight allowed was fifty pounds, so the brick company parcelled them up in lots of seven, and delivered them to the post-office. Chaos ensued. 80,000 bricks, fourty parcels a day. To say the postmaster and his workers were not impressed would be an understatement. Parcel offices along the way, and the railroads ,all complained bitterly to the Postmaster General of the time, who was so incensed that he rewrote the legislation, to the effect that henceforth, the maximum any one consignor could send to any one consignee in any one day would be 200 pounds in weight. In a letter announcing the amendment to the legislation, he noted that "it is not the intent of the United States Postal Service that buildings be shipped through the mail."

Yes, I know this post is somewhat disjointed. I was trying to curb my enthusiasm, as I haven't got time to write an entire book. So it was more about what to leave out. Roman tile-bricks, and Hampton Court  Palace, for instance...

Oh, very well then... Hampton Court was built for and partially designed by King Henry VIII of England, and it was constructed of red brick. The king had broken with tradition for grand residences, and used the brick in several innovative ways, shaped (rubbed) brick features, contrasting bricks etc. Suddenly brick was fashionable, not just functional.

Found in the Attic, from 1795

(As usual, click to embiggen.)

Going Undergound.

This week, and last week, I've been busy with a bit of building maintenance. We have a building, under which was rumoured to be a basement full of water. The only person who could recall having been in there was the company chairman. Apparently, in the late 1950s there were all manner of educational and hobby clubs among the company employees, and he, then in his twenties, was a member of the Archery Club. They used to practise indoors in winter in the basement.

The building was erected in the 1920s, with a water-filled reservoir beneath it which supplied fire-fighting water, and boiler cooling water, this was fed from springs on site, and also from a sixteen-inch iron pipe running from a deep-well pump at the other mill, a quarter of a mile away.

When, in the late nineteen-thirties, war in europe was expected, the reservoir was drained, tanked with asphalt, a nine-inch thick, heavily reinforced concrete slab poured above it, and it was turned into an air-raid shelter, with steps at both ends, steel blast doors, and an escape tunnel to an open area nearby. There were toilets, a kitchen, bunk-beds, a first aid station... We have all the plans in the archives.

In the late nineteen fifties, however, there were plans to install a steam-turbine power-station on site. This would generate electricity for both mills, and reduce the costs of running all the post-war electricall powered machines. So the clean-water reservoir was needed again. The stairs were taken out, the rainwater diverter pipes smashed, the drain closed, and the basement allowed to fill to a depth of about 7'6". The access hatches were concreted over.

When the turbine, known as "Eleanor" was taken out of service in the early eighties, the basement was forgotten.

Now, with the ground-floor untenanted, we decided that a structural inspection was due. I had to find the hatch, Which proved not to be easy. The measurement indicated on the plan was bogus. But after a fair bit of jackhammering we found a steel hinge, and from there, managed to cut a hole, finding the original steel ladder.

A cheap sump pump was lowered into the water, and I checked the rate of level drop. It took two days to get to within wading depth of the ladder section, then, surprise, a doorway. And three steps down. Gak. Thigh deep water. No ghost so far. Nor skeletons, or pirate treasure-chests.

 The old stairway, now filled with rubble is at the far end.

Down the pump went again, for another day, I calculated that the cheap pump, of the sort you might buy to run a waterfall in a pond,  had shifted over 480 tonnes of water.

Down in the bottom layer, however, there was a lot of black ooze, and the pump kept clogging, so we ended up with a big tanker, and three men, using it as a giant wet-vac. Yesterday, we shifted 4,500 gallons of black goop.

Next step was to get the structural steelwork guy in to assess the corrosion. He said it was all okay, scale off the loose stuff, wire-brush, paint with bitumen, and check every five years.

Oh, and prise out the rotten shuttering wood. It won't be me doing it. we'll contract it out, I suspect two men, maybe two weeks, in the dungeons. Then we'll let it fill again..

What fun I have.

Beneath a Kiln.

Page 6
Factory Building Studies, Sites and Foundations, HMSO, 1960

To understand this, you really need to know a little about how brick kilns operate. I could bore you for hours on the subject of kilns, and at least a couple of those hours might be on the history of bricks. I realise that out there in the world there are people who don't know and don't care what a brick's made from, or how, or the differences beween clot-bricks and extruded or pressed one, kibbled vs.wire-cut...

The kiln in question would almost certainly have beem a Hoffman kiln. The Hoffman kiln operates a series of chambers, and fires constantly. As one chamber is firing,  its hot is passed through other chambers, preheating and drying the bricks, when it reaches temperature, the adjacent chamber's fires are lit, and air supplied to their fire passes through the just-fired chamber. The process was more efficient than the intermittent kilns previously used. Some Hoffmans fired for fifty years and more, continuously, hence the ground heating effect.

Monkey Business.

Gary Rith has been hanging wit' the monkees recently. His new partner in crime is a sock monkey called Georges Le Soq.
Little does he know that there's a monkey in my kitchen cabinet. He's a famous monkey, in show-biz, you know, but it all got a bit much for him, he had a rather unfortunate.... What? oh. sorry, Munkey, I won't go into detail, I promise, nothing about the screaming....
So, anyway, he packed a small bag, left the metropolis and travelled north, where he rents living space in the kitchen cabinet.. What's that, Munkey? squalid? what do you mean, squalid? Oh. Well. I did clean the kitchen in July. It's not due for a while. Well I'm busy. NO! tapping at a keyboard IS real activity, Munkey, look, go make us a cup of tea, eh?

Seen here is Munkey, relaxing at home (next to a cup by The Real Harray Potter- Andrew Appleby, of Fursbreck Pottery, Harray, Orkney. Go to his site if you're a pottery lover).
In Munkey's earlier career, he became famous, with his pal, Al, advertising a digital television service which rather famously went dramatically defunct even before it was launched. Monkey went missing for some time, the stress of being associated with such a hugely failed launch was too much for him.
However, he returned, and he and Al teamed up again, working on a tea advertising portfolio.things seemed to be going well for them.



And the story behind the story...

Until the restaurant debacle.. and the start of the screaming...

So, a month or two back, I heard a knock on the door, and a wet monkey muttered, "I've come about the room"
"What room?" I said.
"The room you advertised in the 'Gazette' ".
"I didn't advertise a room"
At this, the monkey started to cry, brandishing handfuls of paper money "I can pay, I don't need much space, really, I... I... I've got nowhere else to go..." At this he started sobbing. Huge, gulping sobs, and I, cruel though I am, thought again. I put my foot back on the floor, that foot that was poised to launch the wet knitted monkey far out into the street, and for a moment, my heart softened. I snatched the suitcase full of money,  "That'll do as a deposit!", and I showed him to his room.
We get on alright. I'm tired of bananas. He cooks a good chili.

Ever Clicked Something by Mistake?

-And lost an age's worth of thoughts down the plug-hole?
It happens to me all the time. Some of you may have noticed that I seem to do more writing, when I have a comment to make on somebody's blog, than I do in writing my own blog. I used to lose blog posts too, an hour or two's worth of  writing, uploading pics, rewriting, and then Pfssttt! gone.
When that happens, I'm often too demoralised to continue, I think, well, I'll return to that tomorrow. But I don't because my creativity, my indignation, whatever it may have been, has been burned out in that first write.


Which brings me to the point of this post. I use Firefox as my browser.  I was installing the plug-ins and add-ons that I find indispensable and I found one that's just brilliant, the cat's pyjamas, the bee's knees, the dog's b..... er, well. it's very good. No more losing the contents of a comment form, Like when you hit the button to post the comment, and.. it doesn't, it's not posted, but it's gone from the comment form.  This gadget saves everything you type into a comment-box, and should you hit "back", or delete, or go by accident to a different page, returning to a white, empty comment box, a couple of mouse-clicks will restore your typing, bring the dead comment back to life. (it saves on your own computer, not on the web, and will encrypt your musings and password protect them should you be using a shared computer).
That's why it's called Lazarus. No blogger, or blogsurfer, should be without it. Especially the clumsy ones, like me.



Lazarus...http://lazarus.interclue.com/

Isaac Guillory

The Blog Archipelago, Revisited.

Reading, today, the words of Jim Gottuso whose blog is one year old, on this day, I was musing about blogs and bloggers, how Jim and others have become friends, though distant, and never met in real life... Well, I've met a couple! Matt Grimmitt and Tiggy they're both bloggers and makers, Matt is making great slipware, he's tremendously enthusiastic about the traditions of country pottery, of the old skills, you know, when you're an enthusiast and you meet someone just as crazy... just like me, Matt picks pottery sherds out of the mud of the fields, and can feel the hand of the potter, figure out the grips and pulls that made that shape. Tig makes soaps, and grows and sells plants, her soaps are swirls of colour and scents, beautifully presented and packaged, somehow the arts complement each other, plants, pots, soaps, and somehow I met these guys via the blogs.

I was going to write a post about my view of the world of blogs, but then, I remembered I already did. Back in January '07, I was at home, for five weeks, told I MUST not go to work, do anything strenuous, get stressed, after the hospital gave me a drug without doing the required test first. My blood pressure went far beyond the red line on the dial, well into the danger zone. I said "Well how bad is it, what's it mean in real terms? And the consultant said "I wouldn't take a bet on whether you'll get home intact".

So five weeks. Don't go out walking or driving.. just lounge about and do nothing, read. So I did. I read blogs, travelled the innerspace of the internet, and met new people, one very special one in particular.

I wrote this. I'm unapologetic about reposting it, because back then I seemed to turn out better shaped wordery than I do now.

"An Archipelago: That's what we are, tiny islands adrift in the great ocean of the web's wide world.
Although I'm new to the business of bloggery, I'm not new to blogs. I've been wandering, watching, reading, enthralled, for a longer time than I remember.
Long ago, I ditched my television, because there were just too many channels not worth watching.
There were some good things too, but generally I don't miss it.
I find the written word has better pictures, anyway.

I sail alone upon this imaginary ocean, I could be like Captain Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail, single handed around the earth. -In a boat he built for himself, felling the trees, forging the fittings.

I sail, making landfall at enticing islands, I stay, linger, read, sample the produce, make a new friend, perhaps, and then I row back out to my sturdy ship, hoist the anchor, set the sail.
Sometimes, at an island, I find recommendations for other islands to visit, and I mark my chart accordingly, at other times I'll sail beneath the stars, listening for surf. One day I might find your island. I'll admire your grass hut, try that hammock by the beach, read your words.
Perhaps I'll swim to my boat for ink and a quill, on your beach I'll peel a strip from the paperbark tree and write my little message. Perhaps I'll still be in the lagoon when you return, and we'll chat, become friends before the tide draws me away.
Along the way, I consign my scribbles to the waves, tight-corked in bobbing bottles. Who knows where they will find landfall, who knows what waifs or beachcombers will open and read.
In the night, my ship comes oft to my own island, or maybe my island follows. I sit at my own driftwood fire, writing my thoughts, for anyone and nobody to read. I pin them to the side of my hut, and, hearing the call of the whales, return to the sea.
When I come again to my island, I remark, with glee, your footprints in the sand. I hope you found fruit and food aplenty, refilled your casks with sweet water, rested in the hammock, sampled the wine, picked through my book-case, I hope the lamps were lit, and you left refreshed.
Perhaps you read my words, and found the pens and paper, on the table, and perhaps you left your thoughts, pinned there. Maybe you scratched graffiti on my wall. Or took a trinket. Maybe you just moved a chessman, and smiled.
I'm not sure why I am voyaging, except for the idea that there's always something to be discovered beyond the next horizon.
How about you? What calls you to the keyboard? to the little glowing box, the window into these myriad worlds? Do tell, I really really do want to know.
I'm not sure why I am here, but on my travels I've met some good friends. People who I'll never touch, but friends all the same, I've been shown new music, art, poetry, and I've read things that make me laugh, things that make tears spring in my eyes. Just as if I were truly travelling.

John Donne wrote:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

We bloggers are not the islands, we inhabit them; also we roam, befriending some, shunning others. We are travellers in the web, interlinked, interwoven, in designs more complex than we can grasp. We can come together, on one beach, and party as a group of friends, or retire to our own island, solitary, perhaps, but never alone, for out there, we can see the twinkling lights of each other's fires, the glows of the lamps beneath which we all write."