This page is intended to help inspire interest in preserving
our ever-dwindling architectural heritage & to foster a growing
consciousness so we can:

• Become more aware of our built heritage;
• Encourage good preservation practices;
  
• Lobby for a high standard of conservation where necessary;
  
• Look for ways to enhance the architectural qualities of our surroundings;
  
• Guard against unnecessary loss of irreplaceable items.

Traditional building materials and architectural period features are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain and expensive to buy, creating problems for remedial, repair or new period-style building work. Yet, astonishingly, many traditional materials and features which could easily be reused - some of historic or architectural importance - are instead destroyed because no immediate use is apparent - or as is often the case, no immediate buyer is found.

The story of brick reaches back into pre-history. There is evidence of bricks and brickmaking in ancient India, the Middle East, North Africa, and North and Central America. The first sun-dried bricks were formed in around 8,000 BC in Mesopotamia - now Iraq. However, it was not until bricks were fired in a kiln that they became truly durable. Excavations have found perfectly preserved fired bricks dating from as far back as 5000 BC.

The material employed in the earliest buildings constructed around Rome was "tuff", a volcanic rock of varying hardnesses, some soft enough to be worked with bronze tools. Later, other harder volcanic stones were used, such as peperino and albani stone from the nearby Alban hills. The Romans developed the manufacture of bricks and took their technology into conquered lands, including Britain in 54 BC.

Although the skill was lost when the Romans finally withdrew in 410 AD, Roman bricks were recycled over the centuries, a prominent example being Colchester Castle (pictured right), completed in 1080 AD from bricks then over a millennium old. The English brick industry was revived by Flemish brickmakers brought to England in the thirteenth century.

For centuries all aspects of brickmaking were done by hand, from extracting clay to shaping bricks and setting and drawing the kiln. It was common in remote areas for clay to be extracted and bricks shaped and fired on the site by itinerant brickmakers. Until the early 1800s bricks were fired in clamp kilns that were pulled down to remove the bricks. These were slowly replaced by permanent kilns. A big change came in the mid-1800s when steam power mechanised the arduous task of hand moulding bricks. A handmoulder turning out 1000 to 1300 bricks a day was no match for a machine producing 15,000 bricks a day.

Waverley Station is in the centre of Edinburgh. It is a vast construction with over 20 platforms, set deep in the valley between the old and new towns of Edinburgh in the shadows of both Edinburgh Castle & the monument to Sir Walter Scott.

Metal has been used in building in various forms for many centuries. More often than not, it was used for window framing, but sometimes inside a double-walled structure to give extra strength, or for roofing.

Decorative cast iron frames were a mass produced American architectural innovation of the 19th century. Used as building facades, cast iron was cheaper than stone or brick and allowed ornate features to be prefabricated from moulds in foundries. This was an inexpensive way to produce a structure with a face that was ornate, costly looking and stylish, which at first meant classically inspired Italian Renaissance, and later, French architectural styles.

The new facades permitted designers to build larger windows on all floors, bringing natural light to where there was none. Today, New York City has the world's largest concentration of full and partial cast iron facades. The best, built in the 1870s, are in the SoHo Cast-Iron District (pictured right).

In England, an efficient, prefabricated method of internal skeletal construction was developed, of which the most notable example was Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) in London. Iron and glass canopies were used to cover such diverse structures as shopping arcades, library reading rooms, and the vast new railway terminals.

Today, metal is used far more in architecture than just the traditional roofing and facades of industrial sheds. It is greatly used for its aesthetic qualities to cover theatres, museums, and exhibition buildings with shimmering layers of copper and titanium. It enables extravagant forms to be constructed, and even in low-cost, prefabricated buildings, metal is used in new and interesting ways.