It’s always made me think, how the craftsmanship that went into many old buildings outlast people. It’s a shame that not many of those bricklayers techniques you mentioned get used on modern architecture. I quite like flint walls, set into a supporting brickwork.
I wish we took the time and detail to still build, our modern architecture like this, all the ages of history in this country and now we just have tall sandcastles whilst our ancestors built these
Hello Alice. What a beautiful stunning day. Suits you. So, rather than considerations of style, the first consideration to make is, how do we make the wall stand up. You see, the most efficient method of erecting a brick wall is the stretcher method, because you get the greatest wall square footage for your bricks. However, you build that wall over 3 to 4 feet and it will fall down. So, you actually need another wall to hold the first wall up. Haha, but true. But, unless they are touching, or tied together with those lovely steel bracing ties, the two walls will still fall over, particularly in a strong wind, or any foundation shift. So the header or English bond method is primarily about tying the two walls together, not for style. The two walls with an air gap between them are commonly called double brick, and for a 12 foot ceiling height we'd probably have 3 or 4 evenly spaced courses of the 'Flemish bonds,' though I don't know if it has a particular name when there are only 3 or 4 courses of perpendicular bricks. You can often tell the double bricked buildings if they have been rendered or painted over, by the fired clay air vents in the lower outer walls. This allowed air flow through the cavity between the walls, reducing damp and regulating the building temperature. It wasn't heat efficient like today's building, but it achieved its purpose. I grew up in a home built in the 1890s, a Victorian two story double brick, a ship captains home originally, lovely 14 foot ceilings and ornate plaster cornices, and my father, constantly carrying out restoration or renovation, we came across these tie courses between the 2 walls whenever we made a new doorway or additions. Today, we would only see this application where cost was no issue, and instead we use aluminium bricks ties, made from 3 or 4 mm wire, set into the cement between the bricks, tying the 2 walls together. We can look back to the walls of old, still subject to the same laws of physics, and the higher they were, the wider they needed to be at the bottom. The outer skins would be rough or hewn stone, the inside, between the outer two walls, was often rubble, but, every now and then a large cross or tie stone was placed across between the two walls, tieing them together. Dry stone walling follows the same principle, and guess what they call these cross or tie stones ? 'Through stones' or 'Perpen stones.' I suppose from where we get the word 'perpendicular, ' intending to mean, linearly opposite.
I've also seen a row of Drunken Soldiers (upright bricks on an angle) at the top of a wall to fill in one and a fraction of rows. Typically, an indication of poor, ill-planned, bricklaying skills.
