Now that we have considered bricks and partly considered mortar, it remains to pay some attention to brickwork.  The simplest and most familiar work for a bricklayer to do is to build a wall.  In doing this his object should be to make it as stout as possible for the thickness, and this stoutness can only be obtained by interlacing the bricks.  If they were simply laid on the top of each other, the wall would be no more than a row of disconnected piles of bricks liable to tumble down.  When the whole is so adjusted that throughout the entire wall the joints in one course shall rest on solid bricks and shall be covered by solid bricks again—­in short, when the whole shall break joint—­then this wall is said to be properly bonded, and has as much stability given to it as it can possibly possess.  There are two systems of bonding in use in London, know as English bond and Flemish bond.  English bond is the method which we find followed in ancient brickwork in this country.

In this system a course of bricks is laid across the wall, showing their heads at the surface, hence called “headers,” and next above comes a course of bricks stretching lengthways at the wall, called stretchers, and so on alternately.  With the Dutch fashions came in Flemish bond, in which, in each course, a header and a stretcher alternate.  In either case, at the corners, a quarter-brick called a closer has to be used in each alternate course to complete the breaking joint.  There is not much to choose between these methods where the walls are only one brick thick.  But where they are thicker the English has a decided advantage, for in walls built in Flemish bond of one and a half brick thickness or more there must be a few broken bricks, or bats, and there is a strong temptation to make use of many.  If this takes place, the wall is unsound.

Many of the failures of brickwork in London houses arise from the external walls, where they are 11/2 bricks thick, being virtually in two skins; the inner 9 in. does the whole of the work of supporting floors and roof, and when it begins to fail, the outer face bulges off like a large blister.  I have known cases where this had occurred, and where there was no header brick for yards, so that one could pass a 5 ft. rod into the space between the two skins and turn it about.  This is rather less easy to accomplish with English bond, and there are other advantages in the use of that bond which make it decidedly preferable, and it is now coming back into very general use.  There are some odd varieties of bond, such as garden bond and chimney bond.  But of these I only wish to draw your attention to what is called cross bond.  The name is not quite a happy one.  Diagonal bond is hardly better.  The thing itself is to be often met with on the Continent, and it is almost unknown here.  But it would be worth introducing, as the effect of it is very good.