The Adoption of Brick in Urban Staffordshire: The Experience of Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1665–1760

Abstract

The study considers those practical factors which may have affected personal and community decisions to build in brick in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is generally considered that provincial brick production before 1760 was traditional in operation, hindered by transport costs and serving a market which was too small to act as a spur to capital investment. How did would-be builders therefore obtain bricks in communities which did not possess a resident brickmaker? A unique response by the authorities of Newcastle-under-Lyme was the financing of a municipal brick kiln. Paradoxically, this civic enterprise, together with the corporation's policy of restrictive housing leases and the lack of investment by the town's other major landowner, Lord Gower, proved disincentives to the employment of brick and coincided to restrict fashionable brick buildings to a small minority of independent townsfolk. In Newcastle therefore the transformation from timber-framed vernacular styles to the more uniform, brick-built, classically inspired style which nationally characterises so much urban building in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a slow and hesitant process.