Bricks and Minibrix

This is not an unusual sight in Cardigan, a town built both with the shallow local stone and with bricks from its productive one-time brick works, both materials now showing their age. The modern bricks on the left are in good nick but look dull compared to this shabby palimpsest of apparently random construction. The terracotta ridge tiles are at their last gasp, the  upper storey window is almost obscured and those familiar botanical opportunists, buddleia and red valerian, have colonised the interstices of the fabric.

I like old brickwork. Looking at this image on my screen I remembered a favourite toy of my early childhood, a box of small brown rubber 'bricks' that locked together to form walls, corner and boxes, I couldn't remember what they were called but it took only a moment to search and find that they were Minibrix.* 

It seems they were invented by a rubber company and first marketed in the 1930s but became popular after the war until displaced by the plastic construction sets of Lego and Duplo. I only had a very basic set but I can still clearly remember the satisfying sensation of plugging them together to form slightly pliable structures into which proportionate windows, doors and roofs could be inserted.

* Minibrix seems to have been designed as a male-only toy; the picture on the box shows a boy hands-on (in tie and pullover) with a girl looking admiringly over his shoulder. It's ironic to think that one of the most outstanding architects of the 1950s and 60s was a woman, Alison Smithson.