For the first time in a few years, I’m looking for a facing brick. But not just any brick.
Last time I specified one, the choice was between an extruded brick made by Ibstock at their Uddingston plant, or a press-made brick from Caradale. Uddingston has since closed, and Caradale went out of business a few years ago - link - leaving Raeburn Brick as the last Scottish brickmaker.
Today I’m looking for a grey multi with character, some patterning and different tones, a little like the variation you used to get on Scotch Commons – but in grey. On this occasion, neither Hanson Brick (now owned by Wienerberger of Austria), Michelmersh nor Ibstock have quite have the right brick, so I had to look farther afield.
However, as Britain was experiencing its Great Brick Shortage - link - with demand high, but production at low levels while mothballed brick plants were slowly brought back into production – Belgium, Holland and Germany weren’t so busy, so they were in a position to export their spare capacity to the UK.
A decade or two ago, there were hundreds of brickworks dotted across Europe - each serving its local market. For one thing, that kept haulage costs down, because bricks are cheap relative to their weight: unlike dressed marble, they don’t justify being sent vast distances across Europe because you can’t charge accordingly. The fact that their clay was sourced locally, so the colour and tone of the bricks was intrinsically a good match for the local geology was an added bonus.
The latest intel from my “mole” in the brick industry is that Hanson (now known as Forterra) are thinking about slowing production down at a couple of their British brick factories, as they’ve run out of space to stockpile bricks and have even filled up a nearby haulier’s yard while they wait for orders to come in…
There are a few well-known, generic bricks: the Scotch common, the Accrington Nori engineering brick, the London Stock brick and the Staffs blue brick. Then you have many what you might call “housebuilder’s bricks”, which are usually colourful and rustic-looking. In design-led projects we’re more likely to seek out the unusual, such as waterstruck or twice-fired engobed bricks, for their appearance and novelty value. 
Cruising in from across the North Sea comes Petersen’s “D29”, which is made in Denmark by artisan brickmakers in formats which are somewhere between UK bricks and Roman bricks, then given a waterstruck finish before being set in coal-fired kilns. Petersen have gained cachet in Scotland by being specified on several Reiach & Hall projects, and have come to be perceived as the thinking man’s brick…
The Dutch and Belgians have a larger brick industry than the Danes, and much of the clay comes from the basin of the Rhine and the River Meuse. The “Castor” by Steenbakkerij Floren (a brickworks is a “stone bakery” in Flemish), which is a small brickmaker based at Brecht in Belgium, is a subtle lilac grey multi with some kiln marks on an engobed finish. Floren have a broad range of facing bricks, and also produce an unfired clay building block similar to the eco block which Errol Brick were developing, before they disappeared from the scene.
“Cortona”, by Vandersanden Brick, is advertised as a subtle mix of grey and anthracite, with a slightly rusticated surface and quite a variation in tone between bricks. In reality, it looks very much like chocolate brownies - and a colleague leapt for joy when she mistook a cut brick slip for something edible… Vandersanden is apparently the largest family-owned brickmaker in Europe with two production sites in Belgium and two in the Netherlands, making a total of around 320 million bricks a year. The Cortona comes in the conventional 65mm metric brick format, and 50mm Continental brick, too.
There’s always the risk of inadvertently specifying something that costs £1000 per thousand, but I discovered that some of the Dutch and Belgian brickmakers have a competitive advantage: they’re paid by the government to dredge clay from the ship canals, so the raw material for their soft mud bricks comes free. They still have to load it onto a freighter and send it across to Grangemouth Docks… but at least they know the canal is navigable…
The “Peak Multi Grey” by Edenhall – who used to be known as the concrete block manufacturer Boral Edenhall, and their website notes that they’re now Britain’s largest independent brick manufacturer and Europe’s leading supplier of concrete facing bricks. This is more evenly textured than the D29, Castor or Cortona, but it’s a true grey rather than an anthracite, gunmetal, slate or the many other euphemisms brickmakers use for colours.
And we have the “Devonshire Grey Multi” by Crest, which is more cocoa brown than grey, reminding me of chocolate marble cake - that melange of cocoa and sponge cake which fancy coffee shops serve. Once again my colleague got excited… Not a grey in the real world, but the brickmaker’s grey has a great deal of latitude. Blue bricks are more grey than blue, black bricks are usually grey, and grey bricks are often a buff colour…
Then finally the “Nevado” brick, which it turns out is the one we’ll probably select. Along with the exotic “Kiezelgrijs” and “Rainbow Graydust”, which sound like they’re escaped from the Pokemon universe, it’s made by Façade Beek in the Netherlands. The firm is part-owned by C.R.H., an Irish conglomerate which owned Ibstock Brick until recently and has, “been enthusiastically manufacturing unique bricks since 1912,” in the Dutch town of Beek. The “Nevado Geel Gesmoord” brick, to give it its Flemish name, is fired twice: it’s fired with oxygen in the kiln atmosphere the first time, then with nitrogen the second time. It’s the second firing which provides its grey tones.
Think you know the size of a brick? Beek know better! A British metric brick is 215 x 102 x 65mm, and Imperial bricks were around 8.5 x 4 x 2.5 inches. However … the standard Dutch brick formats are Waal (207 x 97 x 49 mm), Waaldik (214 x 98 x 66 mm), and Hilversum (228 x 90 x 41 mm). In addition there’s the German Bundesnormaal format (236 x 108 x 71 mm) and Dunnformat (234 x 110 x 52 mm). Plus Danish bricks are apparently 228 x 108 x 55mm… not that we’ll ever give up on 65mm bricks, they're too engrained in the British psyche for that.
What’s interesting is that brick is on a gradual journey from low-value commodity to what economists call a differentiated product – in other words one you recognise and ask for by name, and pay a premium for. It’s telling that we import so many bricks, despite the recent vote to turn our back on Europe and depart the Single Market. In fact, the number of Continental bricks on the market proves how closely allied our construction industry is to Europe, and demonstrates our weakness as a manufacturing country.
Rather than keeping millions of bricks in stock, I’m told that many Continental brickmakers fire bricks to order, forcing you to call them off months in advance. That, along with the cost of artisan-moulded, water-struck, coal-fired “clinkers” mean that we’re bricking it every time we specify a grey multi…
