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Baggeridge Brick, Building blocks

Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer
Zone : Design and innovation
Published : December 2007

Now part of Wienerberger, the largest brick company in the world, Baggeridge Brick has strengthened its specialist role in the UK market, Ruari McCallion learned from Andrew White

Clay bricks have been part of the construction scene for several thousand years and apart from the need to fire (bake) them to make them durable, the process has changed very little. What is different these days is mechanical handling. A modern brick plant can produce millions per week and few of these are touched by hand, until they get to the bricklayer.

Colour and texture aside, there are several grades of brick manufactured to suit specific applications. BS3921 – the brick maker’s bible – specifies dimensions, size tolerance, shape, strength, porosity etc as minimum requirements for each of the grades. For instance, ‘Class B’ engineering bricks must have a minimum strength of 50 newtons per mm2, that’s 7,000 lbs per square inch in old money, and a water absorbtion not exceeding seven per cent of the dry weight. ‘Class A’ requires 10,000 lbs, 70 newtons and 4.5 per cent performance. “We manufacture both of these grades,” said Andrew White, operations director of Baggeridge Brick, “although the demand for ‘Class A’ products is quite small these days.

“Blues are what we are best known for and we are the market leaders in the UK, but the majority of our products go into housing. Our range of products can service any application that may arise in the UK and indeed, worldwide. We ship bricks as far as Japan, although not in huge numbers, but pavers and blue bricks, our specialities, are regularly shipped to the near continent,” said White.

Baggeridge Brick is based in Sedgley, near Dudley in the west midlands, and has a total of five producing locations, the other four being at Kingsbury, Rudgwick, Hartlebury and Waresely. Altogether, the company’s 560 employees (400-odd in production) manufacture around 300 million bricks annually. The west midlands has one of the longest-established brick production industries in the country and Baggeridge has been part of that history since 1944. It is easy to regard bricks as commodity purchases and to be fair, many are, but Baggeridge has made a virtue out of specialisation. Its range currently includes over 100 different types of facing bricks alone, offering varieties of colours, finishes and sizes – as well as the even more specialised, high performance products, of which the Baggeridge ‘Blue’ is probably the best-known. While its forte is specialisation, that doesn’t mean tiny production runs; over the first 50 years of focus in that market, the company has produced over 30 million ‘specials’. Its commitment to quality has been recognised by a clutch of awards, including ‘top five supplier’ to George Wimpey North Midlands, 13 health and safety awards, and a variety of projects that have been shortlisted and recognised for excellence in the Brick Development Association’s annual awards.

Prior to the construction of motorways, the movement of bricks was limited to the immediate locality of manufacture. Brickworks were smaller than today, with capacities of 100,000 to 250,000 per week. Products were moved through the process manually and the packaging of bricks, for ease of handling, did not exist until the 1960s. The delivery vehicles, much smaller than today’s, typically carried 4,000 bricks, loaded by hand three or four at a time, and unloaded in the same way. Today’s vehicles carry up to 13,000 bricks and are equipped with cranes that provide for vehicle turnaround in less than 30 minutes.

Because bricks were made and used locally, the colour of buildings reflected the local clay. There is not much clay in the Cotswolds so stone was the building material. In areas of coal deposits, fireclay is frequently to be found. This fires to shades of cream. Around London, the traditional brick colour is yellow, due to the natural chalk content of the clays indigenous to the north Kent coast. The Baggeridge ‘Blue’ is manufactured from Etruria marl, common to the midlands. It is naturally high in iron, and when fired under reducing conditions, turns blue. The bluing of clay is not unique to Baggeridge. It is a phenomenon that has been understood for centuries. What Baggeridge has done is develop the technology to control the kiln atmosphere in a tunnel kiln for their mass production. No other company has been as successful in this respect.

“Brick has become a commodity product in recent decades so price is the governing factor. We at Baggeridge are therefore continually striving to take out cost while maintaining high quality and service for our customers. The cost of energy, and we use a lot of it, has been particularly painful in the last two years. Four years ago, natural gas was typically £0.25 per therm, then in the winter of 2005/06 the prices went sky high and peaked at over £2.00 per therm. We had no choice but to suspend production at our less efficient plants,” said White. Baggeridge was not alone – it was a problem for the whole industry, causing some manufacturers to close plants, forever!

To help combat cost escalation “we’ve upgraded our control systems from Siemens S5 to S7, which gives us better monitoring and control enabling us to optimise the speed of machinery operation,” White explained. “We’re investing in automating various parts of the system, such as our dehackers. They take the bricks as they come through the tunnel kilns on brick cars and build them into strapped packs, ready to be loaded onto the lorry, which replaces a lot of manual handling.” The tunnel kiln itself is an advance on the traditional kilns, which were batch-based and labour intensive. Tunnel kilns allow continuous flow, and much higher, single unit outputs than traditional kilns. But the west midlands, and the clay-based industries in general, have gone through tough times since the end of the 1980s, with layoffs and redundancies more the order of the day than expansion.

Baggeridge is now in a transition period. It became part of Austrian company Wienerberger, the world’s largest brick manufacturer, in late 2007. The acquisition had to go through OFT and Competition Commission hoops, but the go ahead was finally given in July. As part of an international group, some changes are inevitable but there’s confidence they will be for the better.

“We have capital investment already committed to modernise and to upgrade over the next 12 months, including dehackers at Hartlebury and Kingsbury,” said White. “Where we have specialised, we seek to be the best, with quality raw materials and a good team ethic. We’re confident we’ll continue to compete effectively in our chosen markets.”

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