Bricks

Very Old Wall, a photo by jemmans on Flickr.

These bricks were made with local red clay. They were used by the victorians to face buildings. I new that victorians prefered natural stone and this was the poor mans material of its time.
When reading a book about London called 'LONDON the biography' I was supprised to learn the real reason for the choice of red brick. London used to suffer from terrible fog that sometimes bought the visability down to a very low level. The red colour was chosen so people could see where they where going in the fog. In some cases a carriage would fail completely to see a house in stone hidden by the fog.