Brickmaking has had a long history in Gloucestershire
WITH surgical precision, the tallest structure in Gloucestershire was razed to the ground this week in 1965, when the chimney that towered over the Stonehouse Tile and Brick Company was deleted from the skyline.
No explosive was used. Instead a crack team of Fred Dibnah-esque professionals removed strategic bricks from the base of the stack so that it fell into a specially cleared space.
For those who like statistics, the chimney was 202 feet tall, 17 feet in diameter, comprised 273, 000 bricks and weighed 1, 100 tons. It was built in 1900 by the firm of Orchard and Peer of Bowbridge, Stroud and cost £790.
Other skyscraping chimneys that those of ripening years may remember include one that belonged to the electricity station in Gloucester’s Commercial Road and another of 90 feet at Merrett’s Mill, Woodchester, near Stroud.
Brickmaking has a long history in the county. Bricks were being manufactured on a commercial scale in Gloucester in Roman times. The city’s public buildings were of stone, but brick was used for much of the domestic architecture.
Glevum’s brickworks were found close to the present day site of St Oswald’s priory, which at that time stood on the south east bank of the River Severn, or Sabrina as the legionnaires called it. When the Roman empire ceased to be, the brickworks continued to function. Each brick was stamped RPG, which stood for Rei Publica Glevensium, meaning “from the public works at Gloucester”.
The spread of fashionable brick-built housing in the late 17th century encouraged the growth of brickmaking on Alney Island. A local businessman named Philip Greene had a works making bricks there by 1659, using clay dug from the Ham, as well as Wainlode Hill.
This was shaped in wooden moulds, then fired in kilns fuelled by coal brought up river from the Forest of Dean. John Blanch, a rich city draper and benefactor who lived in Barton Street, built an almshouse in Gloucester from bricks made at Philip Greene’s works and wrote to recommended them as “admirable at six shillings [that’s 30p] a thousand”.
In the 19th century when railways arrived on the scene, bricks were needed for the construction of bridges, viaducts and buildings. In Gloucester brickmakers returned to source clay from much the same spot as Roman slaves had done almost two millennia before.
Digging out this clay resulted, by the 1890s, in a man-made lake known as Tabby Pitt’s pool, which stood adjacent to Archdeacon Meadow on ground now occupied by Gouda Way.
Clay from Tabby Pitt’s pool produced the hard engineering bricks used to build St Catherine’s viaduct.
Gloucester was expanding apace in the 19th century and new brickworks opened to meet the demand of new housing estates. One of these was Whitfield’s brickworks.
If you live in Cheltenham and your house dates from the first half of the 20th century, there’s a good chance the bricks from which it’s built came from Battledown Brick Works.
The Town Hall, the old brewery in Henrietta Street, the General Hospital plus many other landmark buildings are constructed from Battledown’s best and for many years the firm was a major employer.
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The enterprise was founded in 1897 when brothers Roland and Harold Webb bought the Battledown Brick and Terra Cotta Company from the Reverend Arthur Armitage.
The 30 acre works site occupied Coltham Fields, the area bounded by Hales Road, Rosehill Street, Haywards Road and Battledown Approach.
Today Queen Elizabeth playing fields stand where the clay pits were and the industrial estate in King Alfred’s Way stands on what was the works complex.
Other makers in Cheltenham, such as the Pilford Brickworks at Leckhampton, were taken over and by 1907 Battledown was the only place producing bricks in town.
Like small makers all over the country it became increasingly difficult to compete with the huge London Brick Company (of which Norman Wisdom, who was stationed in Cheltenham during the Second World
War was a director incidentally) and in 1971 the Cheltenham firm went into voluntary liquidation.
The brick facades you see on half timbered buildings in Tewkesbury’s three main streets were made at the Mythe at a works that was in business from the 16th century. In 1700 it was owned by William Walker then later was acquired by Thomas Mann.
Over a dozen brick makers operated from Doverow Hill, Stonehouse. All were bought out by the Stonehouse Brick and Tile Company Ltd., which set up its works on the lower slope of the hill in 1891 and remained in business until 1960.
Happily, not all Gloucestershire brick makers have gone out of business. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-avon, remodeled a few years ago, has a 118ft tower constructed with 168,000 bricks made at the Coleford Brick and Tile works in the Forest of Dean.