Coronation Brick

I thought I'd managed to sidestep the Jubilee theme, but then I uncovered this brick in rubble at the edge of campus.

Stray bricks can provide interesting signs of the past, as brick production historically was very localised, and most brick manufacturers stamped their bricks with distinctive makers marks. In that sense they a key part of historical industrial ecology. Over the past year or so I've come across odd bricks in the city, on the moors, in the woods and on the beach. I'm building a set of images of what I find, and most reflect my immediate locality. There is a great web site curated by Dave Sallery that is slowly rediscovering, and through that providing an identification guide for all these old bricks.

This "special edition" brick was made by Armitage of Leeds, and was stamped to commemorate the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. This makes the brick older than the campus, as we only opened in 1966.