Why (or do) we build with brick?

Around 150,000 new homes are constructed each year in England. The majority of buyers choose, or at least would prefer, single unit housing, whether detached, semi-detached or terraced. Housebuilders insist that buyers are conservative which results in most new homes to be clad with clay brick, which eases the process of planning permission and leads to quick sales. This research is adding complexity to England’s attachment to brick-built homes. It argues that there are numerous agencies at work in stabilizing this form of construction: subjective (mis)understandings of the material; the embedded gendered processes and spaces of construction; the instant creation of a sense of place; and the shift to the commodification of housing as the owned home becomes integrated into wealth accumulation and welfare provision.
Through ethnographic observation of three new building developments and interviews with building professionals, manual workers and home buyers, several tensions and contradictions regarding the use of bricks in home building emerge. Among consumers the historical use of brick plays an active part in developing a sense of place, but buyers are less concerned with the material construction of their new homes and more with the house in the wider geographical setting. Otherwise constructed of block or timber frame, using brick as an external facade suggests a ‘traditional’ house, while not making full use of the various capacities of the material, notably decoration, flexibility and strength. Retaining the symbolic importance of brick while restricting the full range of its capacities has led to a reduction of workmanship while preserving a profoundly gendered craft through the associations with ‘heavy’ work of masonry construction. This has the potential to stifle innovation in housing construction through inertia and lead to architectural homogenization of England’s new housing landscape.
Despite considerable geographical attention being paid to the material home the very fabric of ‘ordinary’ homes has largely been overlooked. This research demonstrates that behind ‘common sense’ assumptions regarding the use of this mundane material is an entangled meshwork of agential phenomena holding the modern clay brick in place.