Brick making in Suffolk
Today the great industrial production of bricks is in Leicestershire with the Ibstock group in the northwest of that county and Forterra's at Desford in Leicestershire, and at their Staffordshire factory near Tamworth. However, this was far from the case in early times.
Pevsner noted that “for English brick, Suffolk is exceptionally important”.
In the book Brick Building in England, author Jane Wight notes in the introduction that “overwhelmingly the most important counties for old brick are Norfolk and Essex, followed by Suffolk”.
It has been assumed that the English lost the art of brick making after the Romans left and the Dark and Middle ages were characterised by other materials as well as some re-use of Roman brick. Brickmaking continued on the continent and with the proximity of East Anglia to the continent it is always possible that bricks were imported, notably from Flanders.
Pevsner says that “In the standard literature there is in fact no reference to home-made bricks earlier than those at Little Coggeshall Abbey in Essex of c1225. But Suffolk possesses at Polstead (c1160) a church with Norman brick arches inside which are not Roman, and can in all probability be considered of English make.... These bricks are followed by those at Little Wenham Hall of c1270...and at Herringfleet Priory of c1300 - still extremely early dates as far as England is concerned”.
Pevsner also notes that “Suffolk is one of the best counties in which to enjoy Tudor brickwork” and that as well as red bricks some parts of Suffolk produced white bricks. Some can be seen at Little Wenham Hall and many more from 1525 - 1538 at Hengrave Hall". “But the heyday of white bricks was the C19, when an important centre of production was Woolpit; a great many can be seen in the Ipswich neighbourhood”.
Ipswich, the County’s largest commercial centre, also has a long history of brickmaking. Among the Ipswich probate mentions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries published by the Suffolk Records Society in 1981 is one relating to Henry Wiseman, brickstriker, dated 1589.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the brickmaking industry in Suffolk had achieved a more than local significance, because with the advantage of convenient water transport and later by making use of the railways, some of the County’s larger brickmaking concerns played a large part in supplying the needs of builders outside the region.
It is well established that brickworks in the Sudbury area, notably that at Ballingdon owned in the earlier part of the nineteenth century by Robert Allen, sent bricks down the Stour by lighter from which they were transhipped at Mistley quay into sailing barges for the coastwise journey to London. There they were used in the construction of many large buildings including the Royal Albert Hall and the South Kensington museums.
Brickworks in Sudbury included the Victoria Brickworks off Bulmer Road, the California Brickworks on Gallows Hill and the Alexandra Brickworks in Newton Road at Chilton.
Brickworks made good use of the railways. Elmswell, the Grove Brickworks at Ipswich and Dukes Brickworks from a line at Westerfield (Dukes was in production until 1959). Valley Brickworks in Foxhall Road (later Celestion and Bull Motors, now residential) also had sidings of its own as did the brickworks at Leiston.
In the 19th century almost every village, and certainly every town, in Suffolk had its own brickworks. The evidence is still there in the countryside where the bustling brick industry left behind reminders in the form of overgrown pits in fields and woods, and sometimes the ruins of disused brick kilns.
One of the last brickworks to close in Suffolk was Hall Farm Brickworks in Aldeburgh, which began in 1840, and closed under the ownership of WC Reade, who ran the business from 1926-2011. The company was fortunate to have its own railway line running down to a jetty on the bank of the river Alde.
The Bulmer Brick and Tile Company near Sudbury, but over the Stour in Cambridgeshire, still makes traditional Suffolk bricks from London clay, which has been extracted from the same seam almost continually since Tudor times.