How Handmade Bricks Are Staged, Fired, and Graded

At Northcot Brick in Gloucestershire, England, bricks are still made by hand-throwing clay into wooden moulds, producing the textured, irregular surface that machine-pressed bricks cannot replicate. Each brick passes through staging, drying, firing, and grading taking approximately three weeks from raw clay to finished product.

The clay is dug from the company's quarry, a deposit of Lias clay laid down approximately two hundred million years ago during the Jurassic period. After weathering in stockpiles over winter, the clay is pugged, mixed with water to uniform consistency, in a mechanical mill.

Moulding by hand involves throwing a clot of prepared clay into a sand-coated wooden mould with enough force to fill every corner. The excess is struck off with a wire, and the green brick is tipped out onto a pallet. This throwing action creates the slight surface irregularity distinguishing handmade bricks from pressed counterparts.

Drying takes place in open-sided sheds where green bricks are stacked with air gaps between them. Over one to two weeks, moisture content drops from roughly twenty-five percent to below five percent. Too-rapid drying causes cracking; too-slow drying risks mould growth.

Firing takes place in Hoffman kilns or modern tunnel kilns at temperatures between one thousand and eleven hundred degrees Celsius. Bricks closer to the heat fire harder and darker. Grading sorts fired bricks by colour, hardness, and surface quality into categories: facing bricks for visible walls, engineering bricks for structural use, and seconds.

Matching an existing wall is arithmetic before it is aesthetics. The UK metric standard is 215 by 102.5 by 65 millimetres, but anything built before the 1960s is likely to be imperial, with brick heights around 68 or 73 millimetres. Measure four courses of the existing brickwork, joints included, and divide by four to get the gauge; that figure is what the brickworks needs. Northcot and other traditional works run imperial sizes and specials, including plinths, bullnoses and squints, precisely for this kind of repair.

Handmade bricks demand the right mortar, and this is where most modern repairs go wrong. A soft, low-fired brick bedded in a strong cement mortar loses its face in the first hard frost, because the joint is now harder than the brick and movement has nowhere else to go. Use a lime mortar, typically a natural hydraulic lime around NHL 3.5 for exposed work or a lime putty and sand mix in sheltered positions, so the joint remains the sacrificial element. Repointing is straightforward; replacing a spalled brick face is not.

The premium is bounded and worth calculating rather than assuming. Handmade facing bricks run roughly one to two and a half pounds each against forty to eighty pence for wirecut machine bricks. A half-brick outer skin takes about sixty bricks per square metre, so a sixty-square-metre elevation needs some three thousand six hundred bricks and the difference amounts to a few thousand pounds on a wall that will be looked at daily for a century. Set beside the cost of the scaffolding, it is a modest line.

When specifying bricks for a project, visit the brickworks and handle the products. Specify handmade bricks for any visible exterior surface where character and warmth matter. The modest cost premium over machine-made alternatives is repaid in the quality of the finished wall. Visit https://www.northcotbrick.co.uk