Sunday 23 May 2010
Comment on th Coleford Bricks
I have been openly critical of the exercise to retrieve the bricks from Coleford, partly based on their suitability or otherwise for the Station Building and partly because of the labour intensive exercise required to retrieve them. However, I take my hat off to those who laboured weekend after weekend to dismantle the building, clean the bricks, stack them and transfer them over the 6 ft wall to barrow them to a skip! Well done indeed. In particular credit goes to Alan Bielby who mustered the necessary resources and had the determination to make it all happen.
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3 comments:
I'm not sure why you need to be "openly critical" of the Coleford Bricks exercise unless it was going to be a totally wasted effort. I gather from this blog that the bricks are imperial size and therefore should be very useful. Are they the wrong colour? Or perhaps the wrong hardness? I imagine that they would be very useful for interior walls or for some other use in the reconstruction of Broadway Station. I know that some of the bricks used at Broadway and other sites would be "bespoke" for that early Edwardian station style but I imagine that these will be the difficult ones to find. However, the team has done brilliantly to recover the bricks from Coleford and I do hope that the bricks can all be used at Broadway for the reconstruction of the station.
Thanks for your comment!
I am sure that the bricks will be used and none of the hard work will be wasted. It is primarily the colour and number(insufficient) of the bricks that I am concerned about. We(the Broadway Area Group) have time on our side to make sure the Broadway Station is the "Jewel in the Crown" of the GWR. We should therefore be aiming for maximum authenticity wherever possible. I may have used the wrong words with "openly critical" perhaps I meant "there was too little discussion, and therefore a lack of healthy debate before proceeding on this mission", but I write my blog quickly in order that it is always spontaneous and up to date! (and sometimes controversial!) I have not "fallen out" with anyone over the bricks! There is now a Design Committee in place, which should facilitate a sensible discussion on critical issues in the future particularly when lots of resources are called for and heritage principles are in jeopardy.
Bill
Bill, thanks for the update. I guess it will be difficult to get the number of bricks required without going down the very expensive route of getting a batch made but I'm sure the Broadway team will be looking at all the options - things do turn up!
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