Brick Expressionism and Bricks in London and Europe

I was admiring the brickwork in London in buildings built in the 1930s. Walking slowly around Hatch End to take photos, I discovered many more surprises. Some of the walls had brick mixed with other materials. Others had elaborate patterns.

One seemingly plain wall I had passed several times but not noticed, had bricks of mixed colours, red, white, yellow and grey. As a child I had heard the song in The Wizard of Oz about the yellow brick road. I was puzzled, because I could not imagine a brick road. Yet many houses nowadays have bricks in their driveway.

Nor could I imagine yellow bricks. Yet here in Hatch End are the yellow bricks. You hardly notice that they are yellow.

One seemingly plain brick wall I photographed because adjoining buildings had contrasting colour bricks. When I looked at the photo later, I discovered that the join was crenellated vertically with contrasting colours in square blocks. The effect is as if the two buildings are interlocked by the bricks, like hands joined together, clasping each other, with alternating fingers.

I wondered whether the elaborate brick patterns all dated from the Nineteen Thirties or earlier, in Georgian or Victorian times. I looked up brick and Thirties and eventually found an article in Wikipedia on Brick Expressionism.

"Backsteinexpressionismus describes a specific variant of expressionist architecture that uses bricks, tiles or clinker bricks as the main visible building material. Buildings in the style were erected mostly in the 1920s, primarily in Germany and The Netherlands, where the style was created.

"The style's regional centres were the larger cities of Northern Germany and the Ruhr area, but the Amsterdam School belongs to the same movement, which can be found in many of the larger Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht."

An article on brick history jumps from ancient times to modern but shows the different styles of brickwork in America and Britain.
http://www.brickdirectory.co.uk/html/brick_history.html

I was searching for the words to describe the patterns and shapes of brick. The ends of the brick are called headers, whilst the long ones are stretchers. How do they lay them out. Here's a hint from an article in Wikipedia called Brickwork, which also gave me the name of the pattern Herringbone.

Birck positions from Wikipedia.
Photos taken in Hatch End, The Broadway, by Angela Lansbury, 2016, copyright.
For more photos of The Broadway, Hatch End, see my previous posts on Art Deco.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.