Have you ever noticed …
how many different bonds are to be found in St Leonard’s?
“The name’s Bond, Stretcher Bond”. Somehow, I doubt whether a catch-phrase like
that would make anyone’s fortune, even when announced with Daniel Craig’s
voice. Instead, and at no charge at all,
can I invite you to look at the way that bricks are arranged in the walls of
houses and gardens in the neighbourhood.
“Bond” is the technical term for the pattern of bricks in
walls. Not all walls use the same
pattern. For many years, British bricks
were about 9 inches long, and about half that wide; the thickness was more
variable. Metric bricks are a little
smaller. The long side of a brick is
sometimes called a stretcher. But the
important feature of almost all building bricks is that they are twice as long
as they are wide – just like the ubiquitous Lego brick with eight studs in two
rows of four.
So how do you build a wall with bricks? You have foundations, and then lay the bricks
in successive courses. After that it
depends on whether you want the wall to be one brick thick, or two. Most houses built in the last three or four generations
have cavity walls, so that the outer bricks form a wall that is one brick
thick. On the other hand, garden walls
are generally twice as thick. And that
means that some of the bricks are arranged to connect the two sides of the
wall, so that those bricks have an end or header, rather than a stretcher,
showing.
You could build a wall one brick thick by stacking one brick
on top of the one below, without any overlaps.
Only mortar would connect adjacent stacks, and the result – with a
pattern known as a stacked bond – would be insecure. (A few years ago, the BBC investigated the
strength of Lego bricks that were stacked like this; they discovered that the
bottom brick would be deformed if it supported the weight of a pile of Lego over
2 miles high, but experts from Legoland estimated that a pile of single bricks
about 10 or 11 feet high would be unstable.)
So, for strength and stability, walls are built with courses which
overlap each other. In the Magdalen Road
village, the post-war buildings generally use a stretcher (or running) bond. That means that the bricks in one course
overlap the ones below by half – as if the Lego bricks in one course were
connected to the two below by four studs each.
The bricks in the first, third, fifth and all odd-numbered courses look
the same. Those in the alternate courses
are shifted half a brick length to the side.
Around the cedar tree in St Leonards Road, there is an interesting
variation of this, with the ends of the bricks facing outwards; that’s an end
bond, also known as a header bond. It is
strong and allows the wall to curve.
It is in the garden walls around the neighbourhood that
there is more variety to be found. The
need to have bricks running from one side to the other presents builders with a
variety of patterns. The simplest
patterns have a course of bricks in the end bond style, followed by one or more
courses in stretcher bond, then an end bond course, and so on. The bricks in the stretcher bond courses are
fixed to three below them. (Think Lego
again; the stretcher bond brick is fastened to two studs from one end bond
brick, four studs from the next, and two from the third. There’s a matching row on the other side.) The number of courses laid in the stretcher
form varies. Around St Leonard’s you can
find examples with one, three and five.
(Even numbers look less attractive, and are rarely used.) If there is one stretcher course, it is
generally known as English bond. With three
courses, that’s English garden bond, and with five courses, that’s common
bond. More complicated than these bonds
are those known as Flemish bonds. These
are very attractive and also widespread in the neighbourhood. One course of bricks is laid, Flemish style,
with alternating stretchers and headers.
Then the next course is the same, with stretchers over the headers
below, and vice versa. The course above
that is like the first. There are plenty
of examples in Magdalen Road. A
variation of this is to have some courses of stretcher bond before the next
course in Flemish style.
Belair, in the grounds of County Hall, has a south wall in Flemish Bond. The modern wall to the right in the picture, is unusual in having four rows of stretchers between the lines of ends. |
Before the coming of the railways, which brought
mass-produced bricks to all corners of the country, there were marked regional
variations in the preferred style of building.
Flemish bond is widespread in the south, and English garden in the
north.
This wall in Archibald Road is an example of English Bond |
There are a few walls around us which have mixed
construction, showing the need to rebuild or extend over the generations;
differing bonds and differing bricks can identify them. Most of these are in the older streets, but
not all – Rivermead Road has one example.
Exeter’s oldest brick building, the Customs House on the
Quay, has very irregular brickwork; maybe the builders were unfamiliar with the
new material. But the small chimney on
the left hand side, added later, is mostly in Flemish bond. That’s the King’s Pipe, where contraband
tobacco was burnt. Maybe James Bond’s
predecessors had a hand in apprehending the tobacco smugglers?
Printed in St Leonard's
Neighbourhood News, January-February 2016
Keywords: St Leonards, Exeter, history, geography, beauty