Bricklaying in Boscombe

Chimney stacks. The big Boscombe villas were built with several stacks each, and once a house is split into flats most of them heat nothing. A cold stack takes weather on all four sides, the joints go soft, the flaunching round the pots cracks, and the top courses work loose.

We take a loose stack down to sound brickwork and rebuild it in matched brick and a mix that suits it, with new flaunching, or take a redundant one down below the roofline and make good the roof. Either wants a proper scaffold, and it is worth sorting the lead flashing while the platform is up.

Bays and lintels. The bay is the part of a Victorian or Edwardian house that works hardest: a small roof dumping water on it, brick piers carrying a lot, and a lintel over the window with little to spare. A crack stepping up from the corner of a bay usually means a lintel that has rusted or dropped, or brickwork that has moved on its footing. We open it up, replace the lintel and rebuild the brick above, cutting out and replacing cracked bricks rather than filling them.

Front walls, piers and copings. A lot of the older roads in Boscombe still have their low front garden walls with gate piers and a coping on top. Roots from street trees push them over, cars clip the piers, and a coping that has lost its joints lets water straight down into the wall. We rebuild from a sound course or from a new footing, in reclaimed brick where the old ones are handmade or an odd size, laid to the same bond so the repair does not stand out. A boundary wall shared with next door falls under the Party Wall Act, and it is easier agreed before the work than during it.

Solid walls and cavity walls. The pre-1919 houses in Boscombe are mostly solid brick, which has to stay breathable. Hard cement on a soft period brick holds water against the face, and a frost then spalls it off. Later houses and extensions are cavity work, where horizontal cracking along the same course every few feet usually means rusting wall ties, repaired with new stainless ties rather than a rebuild. New extension walls go up in blockwork with a brick outer skin in stretcher bond, tied across the cavity, on a proper footing with a damp proof course, and building control sign it off.

Matching. New brick weathering beside a hundred year old one is what shows from the street. We take a sample, match the colour and texture, and build a small trial panel before the real work.

One person to ring from the first visit to the last. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: access, raking out, the mortar mix, the area of each elevation, any brick replacement and disposal on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.

Nothing on a Boscombe job is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day rather than the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.

Repairs in matching brick need no permission. Boscombe has five conservation areas, including Boscombe Spa, Knole Road and Churchill Gardens, and the council keeps the list. Inside one, taking down a front wall or a chimney that shows from the street can need planning permission, so we check before anything is demolished. New extension walls go through BCP building control.

Ring rather than use the form. Anything overhead or leaning goes to the front of the queue: a chimney with movement in it, a parapet, a garden wall pushed out by roots or a vehicle.

The first visit is about making it safe and stable, and we quote the permanent repair once we can see how far the movement goes. On a converted house or a block, loose brickwork on a chimney or parapet is the freeholder's to repair, so tell the managing agent as well. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.

Call now: 07435 839745

Boscombe's main street is Christchurch Road, and a great deal of its brickwork sits above shopfronts: flats over the shops, parapets at the top of the frontage, and chimneys and back walls you only see from the service lanes behind.

The Royal Arcade, built in the late Victorian years, is listed, and several other frontages along the road are too, which puts any change of brick, window opening or parapet detail on those buildings into listed building consent territory. We will tell you if yours is one.

The practical difference is access. A scaffold on Christchurch Road stands over a busy pavement, so it needs a licence from the council under section 169 of the Highways Act, with a fan or netting to keep the pavement safe and the shop underneath open. We apply for it, and it goes on the quote as its own line with the time it takes. Ownership is the other question: the shop, the flats and the freeholder can each own different parts of the same wall, so we ask who is instructing the work before we price it.

Nearby places we also cover for bricklaying, with straight-line distances from Boscombe, and the other trades we offer in Boscombe itself.

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