Corinna Dean visits Bulmer’s Bricks and Tiles and finds out how traditional materials can become the future of construction
Tucked away on a quiet lane in west Suffolk – complete with thatched cottages, a local farm and an honesty box – is the 500-year-old Bulmer Brick and Tiles. Here, in old brick workshops, the company has a busy workload supplying the UK’s heritage building sector with handmade bricks for restoration, adaptive use and repair. Its clients range from Hampton Court and the Tower of London, to nearby Kentwell Hall in Long Melford.
But Bulmer Brick and Tiles is not just about recreating the quality and crafts of the past. In my role as a design tutor at the University of Westminster’s School of Architecture, I took a group of architecture students to Bulmer to work on a collaborative project, designing and manufacturing ecological brick prototypes. The bricks, to be produced by Bulmer, are designed to enhance plants such as lichen in what are called ‘bio-receptive surfaces’, something akin to a Sedum roof, and they can be specified in urban environments to encourage plant growth, absorb nitrates and reduce air pollution.
Bulmer’s buildings themselves track changing industry practices. The two circular kilns - with brick domed ceilings, clad with thick, wavy edged timber planks, and heated by a ring of furnaces – and the Japanese kiln and four 20-metre brick drying sheds found deeper in the surrounding woods represent the way brickmaking has developed. The company is situated here – astonishingly, production began back in 1450 – because the bricks emerge from the land. Hugging the site in the surrounding fields is a clay seam that is part of an alluvial plane of the Thames – I’m told it reached as far north as Sudbury – laying down layers of blue-brown clay that is ideal for brickmaking.
There is another reason for the longevity of Bulmer, which is that bricks are a highly sustainable building material. Although new bricks are energy intensive in the firing process, the ability of a brick to be dismantled and reused means that it can be in circulation for hundreds of years.
This, too, is the intention of our brick prototype. It is designed with a recess for inserting a plant plug, made from vegetative matter such as used coffee granules. Into the clay mix we introduced recycled materials such as glass beads to create crevices, and also experimented with different organic materials in non-soil substrates – alternatives to soil that encourage plant growth.
These new bricks are designed to be extremely durable. They’re based on the premise that what we build with has both infinite and immediate effects on the environment, from extractive materials to the embodied carbon. This project has given us – and Bulmer Brick and Tiles – the chance to increase awareness about the circularity of building materials.
From quarrying to cleaning to hand throwing and drying, at Bulmer we became acutely aware of the effect of the weather on the manufacture of bricks, where humidity and direct sunlight can either speed or slow the drying process. Brickmaking has a seasonal aspect and historically brickmakers were itinerant. As highly skilled labourers they were in demand and able to command high prices from the best employers.
Observing the brickmaking process, I noticed how the skill of throwing three kilos of clay into a mould requires an almost athletic dexterity.
One of our prototype bricks drew on the heritage of Bulmer itself, and was inspired by a circular fragment of the company’s pyramidal chimney stack. First designed on a computer, we printed a 3D mould with four sides onto which lichen could take form and grow, then introduced a plant plug made out of disused coffee granules and other excess material such as duckweed, using a plentiful supply from a nearby old pond.
Mixed with flour, this created the perfect composite for the project.
Our last prototype used glass offcuts from Langham Glass – a local company who produce glass objects in Suffolk – to create a natural glaze effect.
Construction is responsible for around 40% of the world’s carbon emissions so a company like Bulmer, despite its age, is actually on the front line of sustainability practices. The circularity of the brickmaking process, from quarrying the clay to using Bulmer’s trove of historical moulds before air-drying the bricks, is a practice with a profound social ecology. With innovations like the bio-receptive brick, the company shows how historic rural craft production can help inform the future of our built environment.