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C O N T E X T 1 7 9 : M A R C H 2 0 2 4 13 From Some Architectural Problems of To-day by Charles Reilly (1924) Manchester has lately been cleaning, with the aid of a sandblast, some of her older classical buildings dating from a pre-smoke era, and these have stood the test nobly. The Theatre Royal is a good example. From this one might argue, and I think with some fairness, that as the pall over our towns has become heavier so our architecture has deteriorated. I think it is really a case of cause and effect, though admittedly other things aided in the decline. What is the use of Greek delicacy and refinement in mouldings and ornament when an oily black deposit will very quickly obliterate them and, as has been proved time after time, in a few short decades crumble them away? The good architect is likely to give up hope, and devote himself to clean buildings in the country, where not only mouldings but even texture counts. So we have in our smoky English towns our heavy over- ornamented buildings trying by over- emphasis in every direction to force their way through the grime, and in a clean smokeless town, like New York, light gay buildings with clean line and surface and delicate ornament leaping up to the light and trusting to their general shape and mass for their main effect. The sunny city brings about bright clean-shaven buildings, the smoky one be-whiskered coalheavers grinning at us in their oily facetiousness. Construction History Construction History (Vol 38, No 2, 2023) has two particularly instructive papers on brick. The first, an illustrated 14-page paper by Linnéa Rollenhagen Tilly, discusses coated brick as an ersatz for limestone. Tilly compares architectural works in Toulouse and Stockholm as the culmination of over 20 years of Franco-Swedish research in the field of construction history, where parallels between the two cities in the use of coated brick had attracted the author’s attention. Given the infrequently encountered nature of this material, this paper may be of interest to construction historians, researchers and practitioners. The second paper is a 25-page review of brickwork by Catherine Rangel Cobos, Felix Lasheras Marino and Javier Pinilla-Mellow. It considers running bond and face bond in the construction of solid-faced brickwork walls, using a historical evaluation of English and American technical texts published up to the 1930s. The authors discuss the acceptance of the word ‘bond’ (as the coordinated and concerted arrangement of bricks in each course), such that the overlapping and interlocking arrangement would work as a strong, single structural unit. This is assisted by some very helpful detailed drawings of how the bonds work. The paper discusses face bond and running bond, the latter addressing bonding courses with square-faced bricks, bonding courses with cut-face bricks, bonding courses paired with face- brick headers and bonding courses with metal ties. From the heritage construction perspective, the article aims to assist in recognising an unfamiliar masonry solution and provides ways to allow for correct identification on site. Bob Kindred MBE