Quest to spotlight 'overlooked' brickmaking legacy

A museum is hoping to shed a light on a region's "overlooked" brickmaking history.

The craft will take central stage in a series of workshops and an exhibition at Beamish Museum in County Durham later this year in an effort to get people in north-east England involved with a "missing piece of their local history".

Museum engager Danijel Borna Fiket said there were also plans to develop an app which people could use to record bricks they find and update a database.

Alexander Appleton, who also works on the project, said there was "very little written" about brickmaking in the region, despite the impact it had.

"There's also very little community engagement with the history of brickmaking," he said.

"I suppose in many ways the brick doesn't have the same level of interest and doesn't have the same level of glamour as, say, steelmaking or coal mining, which is probably why it hasn't received as much attention.

"So we feel it's really important to tell that story because there's a whole social history attached to it as well."

Appleton said the idea was sparked after the team started collecting bricks that were abandoned in the area, "quite often over 100 years ago".

It led to the creation of brick path display near the entrance to the drift mine at Beamish about a year ago.

The North East was rich in brickmaking, as the industry was linked to coal in the region, the historian said.

He added there were more than 300 collieries in County Durham in 1913, with almost every one of them having brickworks alongside it.

He said thousands were employed in the sector, including a lot of women, but the region's brickmaking history was "very, very overlooked".

"There's virtually nothing written on it.

"You've literally got one handwritten book, that's all you've got, so we are kind of in a new frontier in terms of history."

The first workshop as part of the project is set to take place later this month and there will be an exhibition at the museum in April.

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