Having grown up as the son of a brickmaker in the 1990s, Nutbourne Brickworks brought back a lot of memories for me. These were tough times for the industry and many brickworks fell victim to reduced demand and cheaper competition from more modern plants. Those that did survive often operated on three-day weeks and struggled to shift the vast surpluses left over from more profitable times.
Nutbourne Brickworks was built in the Summer of 1932 in the backwoods of the Surrey Weald and comprised workshops, narrow gauge railways, factory buildings and two Hoffman kilns.
Unusually and despite later ownership by a major building materials conglomerate, the layout changed very little over the years. The works were considered old fashioned and outdated by the 1980s however, and the then owner, Redland Bricks Ltd., proposed an ambitious rebuild for which permission was granted in 1990. Unfortunately Redland's timing couldn't have been worse and this came in the middle of a housing slump. Rebuilding was postponed, never to be resumed and the works never re-opened.
For many years the site lay abandoned and was left to decay until a developer purchased it in 2000. A planning application for housing on the site was submitted in September 2008 but plans were rejected by the County and District Councils and further efforts fell victim to a second recession and concerns over the impact of any redevelopment. What remains, excepting the demolished kilns, is a remarkably complete 1930s brickworks containing much of the machinery from its operational days.
