Bricking it

I hope you have found out that a boring photo often means a curious story.

One of my favorite daydreams is imagining what London might have been like in the last half of the nineteenth Century. As far as I can see it was a building site. When you look at the explosion in building that took place then, London was growing like mushrooms on acid. Imagine all those bricks delivered by horse and cart - the sheer manpower that was deployed. I'm sure there were many cowboy builders back then, but what they had were legions of craftsmen, and we no longer do. Oh yes, the picture.....

In the newly restored St Pancras Station, if you look closely high up on the side windows, you'll see that the brickwork patterns vary, almost from arch to arch. It appears that in areas that couldn't be seen, bricklayers would compete against each other to show off their bricklaying prowess. I understand from some brick fanciers that this side of the station contains almost every variation possible for laying bricks.