Welcome to Battledown Brick Works!
This our first ever hide, relatively new to caching we have found our most exciting discoveries are those caches that take us to places we have known but tell us new facts about them. Happy hunting!
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You are looking for a small cache in a waterproof blue bag. Please be careful to replace as found. Thank you
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The area you are standing in used to be Battledown Brickworks. The site was ideal due to Lower Lias clay, sand and gravel deposits. In the 1840s two brothers Thomas and John Hayward began making bricks in the area. In the 1860s the Reverend Arthur Armitage established the Battledown Brick Company Ltd and invested in modernising the brick production. He installed a new steam machinery, a fire-heated drying shed which could hold 30,000 bricks and a Hoffmann kiln capable of producing 60,000 bricks a week. By 1902 the site was leased to The Webb brothers who attained permission from the council to build a mill, generating houses and coke bunkers at the brickworks. Brick and tile production continued onsite until the 1960s.
More about bricks…… The brick making process
Digging
Loosened clay was loaded into wagons and loaded into the top of the once 40ft high 4 storey building (now the bakery).
Grinding and Crushing.
Within the 4 storey building a series of rollers (kibblers) grinded and crushed the raw clay.
Tempering and Mixing.
The clay was then mixed with water and sand. The sand was dug by hand from the sandpit on Haywards Lane, loaded onto trucks and tipped into the top of the 4 storey building. Water, from a sump pond, which drained the floor of the sandpit was added and mixed.
The Extrusion Plant.
The mixture was forced through a brick-sized aperture onto a cutting table fitted with wire cutters 9 inches apart. Rams forced the clay forward against the wires, cutting off ten bricks at a time. At full capacity, this machine was capable of making 3,000 bricks per hour, equivalent to 30,000 per day! Tiles were made by hand in the Tile Shed, using specially shaped metal moulds. Land drain pipes were also produced by a specialised machine.
Drying
Three drying processes were used: open air (in the summer), hot shed floor drying, heated by coal flues, and by 1910 the Special Dryer, heated by steam passing through lengths of piping fed from a large industrial boiler.
Burning the Bricks.
After drying, the bricks were stacked in kilns. The burning took 1-3 weeks and had to be attended by day and by night.
Providing the Power
Power for the processes was provided by a giant gas engine.
Apart from a gap in production during the first world war, production at the site continued until the 1960s when the quality of clay onsite decreased and competition from other companies, aided by the increased ease of transporting bricks across the country, led to the company closure.
Most of the buildings were demolished and the area turned into an industrial estate. The 4 storey building (now 2.5. storey), managers office and former stables (turned into a garage) remained. The managers office was demolished in 2000 and replaced with a garage.
References:
David A. O'Connor, Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology Journal (2002) THE BATTLEDOWN BRICKWORKS, pages 4-18
Interesting historic photos of the site can be found here:
https://www.gsia.org.uk/reprints/2002/gi200204.pdf
There is a lovely play area/park and a great snack wagon (Ellas Snacks) really close to the cache :)