Brickwork

Walling a garden is a great way to make your outdoor areas feel completely at one with the rest of your home while improving security and privacy.

You can build a garden wall from bricks, natural stone or reconstituted stone. There’s a wide range of reconstituted stone on the market, made from concrete blocks that are finished and coloured to look like stone.

Types and styles of garden brickwork
There are a literally thousands of different bricks, but they can be broken down into a handful of basic types.

Facing Bricks
Quality, durable bricks with an attractive appearance for external use. Face brick is viewed favourably from a design perspective for several reasons. First, it is unique in appearance and texture and stands out clearly as opposed to standard plaster or wood walls. Face brick is widely variable and can be tailored to whatever appearance you’d like. Although the standard offset pattern of red bricks with white mortar is the most common, the bricks can be of several different colours, sizes and designs.

‘Facing brick walling’

Commons
A cheap ‘fill’ brick, designed to be utilitarian rather than attractive. Having said that, some have a charm of their own and are perfectly fine for smaller jobs.

”Commons Bricks garden walls”

Engineering Bricks
We often come across Engineering bricks being used as a damp-proof course (DPC). The workhorses of the brick family. Tough, strong, hardwearing but not usually very pretty. They have excellent resistance to frost and to water, making them ideal for groundworks, sewer works and retaining walls. You pay for the performance.

”Engineering bricks”

Reclaimed Salvaged bricks.

Reclaimed bricks are old bricks which have been salvaged from demolition jobs and carefully cleaned to remove all the old mortar so that they can be reused on new projects. Don’t be fooled into thinking that because they have been rescued from some old doss house that they will be cheap – cleaning them up and sorting them is a labour-intensive task and they can cost twice the price of a quality facing or a ‘reproduction’ reclaimed.

”Reclaimed bricks wall”