Bricks

At buildingmaterials.co.uk we guarantee quality with our ibstock sourced bricks. The bricks are made all over the country and can be delivered anywhere within the U.K. Our bricks come in a variety of colours, textures and are either handmade, wirecut, stock or waterstruck.

Common clay bricks can be used in foundations and for internal load bearing walls. Common concrete bricks are used to course blockwork.

• Facing bricks are common clay bricks that have a sand face added to them in order to provide them with a weathering surface. They are only suitable for use within a wall and cannot withstand individual exposure to frost.
• Stock bricks are dense clay hard fired bricks that are suitable for most applications and can usually present any face to the weather. Wirecut bricks are similar but are faced on one side and both ends.
• Handmade bricks are made from clay thrown by hand into a mould to create the desired creases, known as ‘smiles'.
• Waterstruck bricks are formed by pressing clay into water-lubricated steel moulds. The trowelling effect of the wetted mould against the soft clay creates a texture that, after drying and firing, produces a patina unlike any other brick.
• A wirecut brick is a brick that has been extruded to shape and then cut to length with wire before firing.

 

Bricks have been around for a long time – in fact they were introduced by the Romans into this country, and by the Middle Ages, they began to be used in churches and other important buildings. After a lot of wooden houses were burnt down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, many houses were rebuilt in brick. They became even more important during the Industrial Revolution and it is only in the last 50 years that use has declined because of the increasing importance of concrete and other cement-based materials in building factories, bridges and houses.

Most clays will make reasonable bricks. Once clay has been dug out, it is ground and mixed with enough water to allow it to be shaped to form “green” bricks. These are then dried slowly, and then fired in a kiln at somewhere between 1000 and 1200°C.

The output of bricks has changed enormously between 1948 and today. For example, the total output of bricks in 1990 was about 4 billion, whereas in 1965, the output was 8 billion. The main use for bricks is house-building, which has dropped dramatically since the 1960s. This is probably because of the substitution of other materials (e.g. cement-based blocks), and because building regulations dictate higher standards of thermal insulation than before, so lightweight blocks are made from a variety of other materials. These have a high porosity, which give better insulation, and they are also therefore lighter, so they can be manufactured into much bigger volumes than a standard brick. Walls made of these bigger blocks are cheaper and quicker to build than ones made with conventional bricks.

As well as being used for house building, the Victorians used enormous quantities of bricks for other purposes, many of which were engineering bricks, e.g. warehouses, factories, mill chimneys, and railway viaducts. These bricks were often made from Carboniferous clays and shales, which were plentiful around the industrial centres of the British coalfields. One of the reasons for the decline in the number of bricks being used is because of substitution (prior to the 1950s, bricks were still used for load-bearing walls, but high rise flats and offices now tend to use a frame made out of steel or concrete to carry the structural load, and quite often even the walls are made out of other materials, either concrete, glass or other non load-bearing material. Where bricks are used, they usually form a layer only 1 brick thick. Whereas the Victorians used bricks for their railway viaducts, motorways built today use concrete for the motorway itself, the bridges and retaining walls. Airport runways also use vast amounts of concrete.