Bricklayers in London will be leading the way when it comes to imbuing a new school with a spirit of sustainability, by reusing thousands of already-used bricks, some as old as 130 years.
The discarded bricks are being used by contractor, BAM Construction, to build the new ARK Academy primary school in Ealing, west London. The construction is taking place on the site of the old school so, instead of removing the bricks that made up the old, Victorian-era building, they are going to be reincorporated into the new one.
The task will require the bricklayers to take extra care in the selection and preparation of the bricks, but BAM did conduct a pre-demolition reclamation examination of the old school to determine how many of them could possibly be reused. It found that around 120,000 were perfectly viable to continue their purposeful lives.
The builders and bricklayers on the scheme have had to manually remove the old mortar from each one of the Yellow Stock bricks and clean them by hand, managing to clean around 1,000 bricks every day.
BAM’s site manager for the project, Peter Maguire, said that the bricks were still in remarkably good condition so it was an easy choice to make to reuse the building blocks. He explained, “Re-using the bricks not only means waste can be avoided but it also ensures that the heritage of the Yellow Stock bricks will live on.”