Matching Old Bricks

An exact match for a brick that has not been made for decades usually does not exist, so matching old bricks is really a judgement call weighing four things together: size, colour, texture and the mortar joint around the brick. Get those close enough and a repair stops drawing the eye. Get one wrong and it never quite settles in.

Bricks were made from different clays in different places, and a brick that has weathered on a house front for decades looks nothing like the same brick coming off a pallet today: the face has softened, the colour has moved, and there is often moss or dirt worked into it. So matching old brickwork means getting as close as anyone reasonably can, not finding an identical brick, and saying so plainly before any work starts.

Size is the one that catches people out, and the one nothing else can compensate for. A replacement brick even a few millimetres off height throws the courses out of line with the wall either side of the repair, and no amount of careful pointing hides a step in a course line. It gets checked first, and it is the detail most likely to send the search for a brick further afield.

Colour is easier to get close on and harder to get exactly right. Old brickwork is rarely one flat colour: look along a Victorian wall and there is a spread across it, which helps, because a repair built from several near-matches settles into that spread far better than one uniform colour sitting in the middle of it. Texture counts just as much. A sharp-edged modern brick next to a soft, weathered one still stands out even when the colour is spot on.

Then there is the mortar, which is where most repairs give themselves away. The joints make up a large part of what is actually visible from a distance, and new pointing in the wrong colour or the wrong profile sends the eye straight to the repair even when the bricks themselves are right. That is why matching old bricks and repointing usually happen as one job rather than two separate ones.

Jack visits before any work starts and says plainly whether a close match, a reasonable one, or a repair that will always show a little is realistic for that wall. Sometimes rebuilding a whole section is the better-looking answer, so there is nothing left beside it to compare against. Every job gets a free, no-obligation quotation, with that judgement explained in it.