Recent Ruins / Catalogue / Masonry
Reclaimed brick
| Period range | 1800-1930 |
|---|---|
| Usual fabric | Soft-fired clay, later machine-pressed clay |
| Usual form | Common, face and paving brick, sizes irregular by modern standards |
| Wear to expect | Mortar adhering to faces, spalled arrises, colour varying within a pallet |
Old brick is not a colour, it is a firing. What makes a reclaimed wall look old is the range within the batch, not the average.
What it is
Hand-moulded soft-fired brick has a sandy, slightly slumped face and an irregular arris, and no two courses of it look the same. Machine-pressed brick from the later period is sharper, denser and much more uniform. Paving brick is a different animal again: fired harder, often keyed or lettered on one bed, and considerably heavier for its size.
How to tell age
Look at the bed face. A sanded, uneven bed with the drag marks of a wooden mould is early. A pressed frog, a maker's name or a regular keyed pattern is later industrial production. Size drifts too, and older brick is generally shallower in height than the modern standard, which is the practical problem when you are matching into an existing wall.
What commonly fails
Soft brick spalls at the face when it has been frozen wet, and the spall exposes a paler core that never weathers back. Brick cleaned aggressively of lime mortar loses its arris and reads new. Brick that was originally an interior backing course is often too soft to be used outside at all.
What to check before fitting
Turn a sample over and look at all six faces, because reclaimed brick is usually sold with one good face and you need to know which. Check whether the adhering mortar is lime, which comes off, or cement, which generally does not. Lay a dry panel of twenty or so before committing, since the batch range only shows at panel size.