A YOUNGER ME (ZIMBABWE 1985)

 

In January 1985 I was working in the Curriculum Development Unit of the Ministry of Education in Zimbabwe. We were producing teaching materials for secondary schools. Pupils had a choice of practical subjects. Some schools offered woodwork and metalwork, some offered agriculture and building.

 

 

My subject was building. Traditionally this had been a course for less intelligent students and restricted to bricklaying practical work. When I joined, the decision had been made to broaden the subject and offer it to all ability levels. We wrote a booklet for teachers to suggest practical work for the new course. This included a schematic breakdown of the course into modules and units with ideas for practical work, problem solving, drawing etc developed in parallel.  Note the hallucinated words generated during AI cleanup. 

 

The booklet was duplicated on poor quality paper from a stencil. Years later I wanted to rescue this work. The digital scans I had were terrible and attempts to enhance them with Photoshop patchy and time-consuming. Now that AI tools have become commonplace, work like this becomes much easier to handle. I have access to AI on my Samsung phone and for this purpose I stumbled on tools built into Microsoft One Drive. The OneDrive “fix” option with “enhance clarity” does a remarkable job, even restoring headings that were clipped in half.

 

The Samsung tools are useful for enhancing the remastered artwork with spot colour. Possible to do this with the bucket fill tools in traditional software, but it takes a while. This was one click (maybe two) and threw in a very attractive variegated brick colour as a bonus. I still have reservations about the use of AI, but bit-by-bit is starting to find its place in my workflows. Nothing too dramatic, but with this booklet I think I can do something that otherwise would never had come to the top of my task list. The amount of manual rework had just become too daunting.

 

One of my ideas was to make a simple training rig that simulated a foundation trench, the process of plumbing down to mark corners, and building up to match a datum peg.  During Covid I decided to retrace the artwork with a digital stylus. The next step would have been to recreate the pages using InDesign or similar. Never happened.

I decided to run this through some of the Samsung options. Quicker than using Photoshop but results are highly variable.  The remastered artwork is bottom right, as created while stuck at home in pandemic mode. Bottom left is “anime.”  Nice and clean. Extra pop from the colours. Top right is “watercolour.”  Even more pop, but perhaps a bit less clarity. Top left is “crayon.”  Positively bizarre but I have found it useful in some cases.

 

 

BROKEN PROMISES

 

Further investigation of the broken bond posted a week ago. Many thanks to all who took an interest.

The snapshot was from the rear of the last house in the row. Broken bond above the kitchen window on the ground floor of a double storey offshot to the rear of the house. The layout is familiar, common to many terraces and semis of the Victorian/Edwardian era which saw so many towns expanding rapidly across Britain. In fact my son’s previous house was very similar to this, albeit slightly smaller and part of a terrace. There may have been an “offshot to the offshot” for outside WC and coalhouse.

 

 

In this case it’s a group of seven semi-detached houses built with polychrome brickwork in an eclectic style. Seven pairs, which appear on a map of 1913 and perhaps under construction on the 1888 map. So probably Victorian. There is a possibility that this pair was the last to be built, perhaps after 1888 (the resolution of the map makes it hard to be sure, the group of semis are shown as a single block, but there is a gap at the end of the row).  In most cases the outside WC has been demolished and replaced with a modern extension.  Styles vary.

 

The gable at the far end of the row uses Flemish Garden Wall, obviously 9 inch (one brick) thick. The facades are all in Flemish with pale/cream string courses and quoins plus the occasional blue brick header. The original photo of the broken bond is from Jubilee Road which I take to be the Golden Jubilee of 1887, just before the map. (available of the National Library of Scotland website as an underlay to the 1913 survey, with transparency slider. What an excellent resource that is.   

 

 maps.nls.uk

 

 

 Windows are timber sliding sash set behind brick reveals. From my experience working on similar house construction in the 1970s as a bricklayer and general builder, the sash box will occupy the thickness of the inner leaf plus plaster, and be finished with architraves to match the door  frames. 

 

 

Was the polychrome intended to convey a red-white-&-blue patriotism?  I haven’t spotted any original rainwater goods, but I’m guessing cast-iron. In Sheffield it would have been timber gutters with cast-iron downpipes. Actually there may be one cast-iron downpipe in the next image. Fretwork barge boards, handsome tall chimneys. The builders may have been a bit lax in their approach to bonding around the back of the building, but you have to admire some of the craftsmanship and respect for local traditions on show here.

 

The use of stretcher bond on the side and back of the last block I take to be a “rationalising” measure, using metal ties. Don’t see the logic of introducing cavity walls just at the back of the building especially when windows there follow the same logic of brick reveals. Did all the headers on the front façade of the building carry right through the wall? Maybe not. Did they actually use metal ties? Perhaps they just hoped for the best. 

 

The broken bond seems to arise from window openings that are four and a half bricks wide. On some other blocks in the same area the windows on the end wall have quoins in white brick. Obviously these need to be symmetrical and planned for at ground level. Broken bond above and below results. Maybe they wanted the reveals to be symmetrical even when they weren’t picked out in this way. Perhaps it was “the way we do it”

 

 

 

This has turned into a much deeper dive that I originally intended but all the better. My aim is to keep studying the buildings around me, especially the older ones, and to gradually come to a deeper understanding of what’s going on. To conclude I will conclude with another visual from the study of my son’s former house that I did in Revit (incomplete). The sash window study earlier in this post also uses Revit of course. My tool of choice for many years now, as an architect, whether on commercial work, or on personal historical studies like this.

Many thanks to all who offered their thoughts and suggestions on the original Linked In post. That’s what prompted me to do the deeper dive and it turned out to be a lot of fun.

 

 

 

STONES OF HAMPSHIRE

 

Three examples of stone carving. Paradoxically the one in the youngest style is probably the oldest. (memorial plaque in the classical style) The other two date to the restoration by Scott. The floral termination to an internal window head I would classify as Decorated Gothic in style. These are just labels but it helps to structure our knowledge as long as we keep an open mind.

The font is definitely by Scott and I would suggest that he was giving a version of Norman or late Saxon. To me it's a splendid, robust, rustic form: well suited to a small rural church.

To the right of the plaque, or wall monument is one of the main timber uprights supporting the roof structure.

 

 

St Michael Heckfield. An interesting conglomerate stone called Ferricrete is used for most of the walling. Lower courses are Reading Beds Sandstone and the carved dressings around windows and doors Bath Stone. The Ferricrete can only be roughly shaped and the matrix is porous. Restoration work has filled up the joints flush and used broken pieces of tile, pushed into the surface, to stop the thick mortar from slumping.

It makes for fun patterns, but I'm guessing the original approach was to Limewash over the whole wall. Except perhaps for the Bath Stone dressings? It looks like some kind of Resin coating has been used in recent times as a modern approach to waterproofing.

 

What can I say? This strange patchwork of materials has become merged into the identity of the church. Should there be a campaign to revert to whitewashed purity? Thankfully it's not my decision. But I would like to think there is a place for strange patchwork churches like this: monuments to serendipity, as well as for others with a unity of form: frozen records of the old ways.

 

 

I spotted this building from the bus the other day. Built in the 1930s for international pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. Shades of Art Deco but without the flamboyance. "During the 1930s the Town Council was promoting the town as a good place for businesses to build their factories"

That's from a small book I bought a while ago. A history of Basingstoke from the year dot. Last week I borrowed a book on Basingstoke in the 1960s from the local library. The beginnings of the London Overspill plan for the town.

Gradually piecing things together.