A few years ago anyone travelling up the A1 towards Peterborough or on the rail line to Bedford will have seen evidence of the region’s history of brickmaking. Bricks were produced for over a century and were known as Fletton bricks, a generic name to describe bricks made from lower Oxford clay. Nowadays most of the old brickworks have gone, victims of rising costs and problems in meeting modern emissions standards.
However, all is not lost for the UK brick industry, with news that the UK’s biggest brick and concrete block manufacturer, Forterra Plc, has opened the country’s largest brickworks at Desford in Leicestershire. The company has demolished its old production facility on the site and invested £95 million in a new factory, which will eventually be capable of supplying enough bricks to build up to 20,000 homes a year. Production is building towards a target of 500,000 bricks a day, with the aim that by the end of 2024 an annual production rate of 180 million bricks will be achieved.
Britain’s next biggest brickworks are also located in Leicestershire, with two factories each producing 100 million bricks a year. The Forterra works will also outstrip Europe’s largest brick manufacturing facility, a 140 million bricks a year plant located in western Russia.
Unfortunately the Desford factory has opened in the face of tough times for the UK house building sector and the company is expecting a 20% fall in brick sales by the end of the year. While the government continues to argue for a target build of 300,000 new homes a year, the reality of achieving less than 200,000 new homes last year means that the new Forterra factory will be starting up at a difficult time for the industry.
The longer term prospects for both the Desford plant and Forterra Plc look much brighter. Not only are there government house building targets to hit, there is also a backlog of demand to meet as well as expensive imports to replace. Forterra claims it has 30 years of clay deposits to draw on and predicts that the highly automated factory will produce earnings of £25 million a year when fully operational. Industry analyst Stephen Rawlinson said: “Investing £95 million in something that delivers £25 million a year is a no-brainer. It may be coming on stream when things are at or near the bottom, but importantly it is not trying to find a market. The market already exists.”
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