Designing Brick History
December 21, 2021THE ZOOM CALL THAT SPARKED IT ALL
It was 11am on a Sunday and I was standing in front of the metal gates leading to the construction site in the Royal Docks, behind Tate & Lyle Sugars Factory in Newham. I had just cycled seven miles and woven through perhaps one of London’s most treacherous stretches of highly-trafficked highways to arrive for the Brickfield Newham project.
Georgia Haseldine is the V&A Public Engagement Fellow behind the conception and organization of this project. That morning she was beaming with excitement in her reflective vest. Up till that point, Margot Drayson, my colleague at the V&A/RCA History of Design, and I had only met Georgia through video call meetings after expressing interest in the Brickfield Project. This project intrigued us immensely, given our shared interest in understanding the built environment, its heritage and its relationship with people. For us, the subject matter of brick engaged not only with material history, but with heritage preservation, industrial history of Britain, architectural-art history. Additionally, it offered innovative potentials of (re)exploring the V&A collection!
Flip through the Brickfield Booklet here
A BOOKLET FOR BRICKFIELD
As part of our public engagement contribution towards the Newham Brickfield Project, we designed and published a booklet to go hand in hand with the workshop. It was designed with the participants in mind. We wanted the booklet to be an integral element to the Brickfield Project that participants could take home. Hopefully the contents within would continue to engage participants of the conversations and reflections they had during the workshop. Designing a booklet-for-all was no easy feat especially given our inclination to want to include readers of diverse demographics, age groups and areas of interests. This significantly influenced our approach to the booklet’s content curation, with each section appealing to a different reader group and/or type of learner.
There was a section on “How to Make a Newham Brick”, which Margot covers in her blog post here, another on the performativity of brickmaking that asks us to consider the act of making as an art form, a bodily experience. The centre fold-out section of the booklet is replete with a historical overview of brickmaking that is broken down into three sections, “Location” (where it’s made and sourced), “Building” (its function and history) and “People” (the makers).
RE(EXPLORING) THE V&A ARCHIVE
Since its founding in 1852, the V&A Museum has amassed a rich array of design objects relating to brick/clay across different departments – from Prints and Drawings, to Ceramics, and Textiles and Fashion. We wanted to showcase the diversity of the V&A Collection and also to highlight the versatile nature of brick from its decorative use to its material formation. The four design objects featured in the booklet included a steel Plaque (1550-1600), a Brick (1300-1400) from a grave in Grenada, a Clay Brick (206 BC - 220AD), and a Tile (2014) made out of commercial waste. The final choice was chosen to specifically provoke more thought into thinking about the future sustainability of brickmaking.
LEARNING OR PLAYING?
The Cody Dock Brick Restorers had arrived that morning, some on their own whilst others with their partner and young children. Many of the young ones immediately gravitated towards the monstrous mounds of black and yellow clay on the side, digging their tiny hands into the natural soil that were all harvested locally from the Royal Docks and Plaistow Station. It was extremely rewarding to see the children actively learn through playing, and to overhear them in conversation with their parents.
The next 45-minutes was a cacophony of thudding and smacking. The Cody Dock participants were at their benches trying their hand at brickmaking. Some were elbow-deep into kneading the clay, some were shaping the block to be ready for the frog mould (the frog refers to the depression inside the brick mould), and others were already carrying their brick-masterpiece to the drying rack. The children were likewise crowded around their work-bench to the opposite end. Their hands caked in clay, sand and sweat. Their faces betrayed a look of glee that comes from realisation that everything can be touched and played with. Seeing this stirred something in me. I was seeing a future generation engaging with raw materials, learning through making about one of the world’s oldest known building materials, which has been fundamental to human civilization construction since 7000 BC.
HISTORY COMING ALIVE
What I witnessed in that morning’s workshop was a sense of intrigue in the children. They were deeply involved in the Brickfield Project, clawing away at clay, shaping it into the frog mould – albeit imperfect – and in the process, (in)directly learning about material, design, and history. It was inspiring to see the workshop integrate industrial heritage, architecture, technology and art-making for the diverse groups of participants; after the Cody Dock Brick Restorers we were joined by the V&A staff members, museum volunteers, and during the public weekend, we were joined by a colourful range of participants with different backgrounds, interests and ages – one was an architecture research student studying in London, the other a musician from Cornwall, and another an Indian mechanical engineer from Newham who succeeded in enticing his entire family, wife, two young daughters and their grandfather, to join him. The future history of brick making was, in those moments, being formed, moulded, and lived out. Within those hours across the month of June participating in the Newham Brickfield Project, I saw how history came alive through public engagement and re-adapted fluidly according to the participant groups, igniting in them an eagerness to participate and learn through involvement.
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Written as part of V&A/RCA History of Design MA
#DesignHistory #BrickHeritage #London
June 2020-21