This was exploited in Kenilworth for the making of bricks as far back as Roman times and ended as recently as 1977.

Often, brickworks were of a temporary nature, set up on farmland to make bricks for a particular project; a couple of such sites survived in field names such as Brick Kiln Close, now occupied by housing on the corner of Park Hill and Leyes Lane, and Brickfield at nearby Crew Farm.
As the 19th century developed, brickworks became more permanent.

One of the earliest was James Arnolds works on the Leamington Road, in use at least by 1830, on a site today occupied by Bullimore Grove.

Another was on Oaks farm, in operation until about 1870. Just off Tanhouse Lane (Whitemoor Road) was a third, dating from the mid 1830s; this was taken on by James Arnold in 1838.

The coming of the railway in 1844 split the Leamington Road site in two; the works were eventually put up for sale in 1878, and there is no record of it in operation after this date.

All these works would have been manually operated. The earliest record of a works having mechanisation was in an 1868 report of a minor accident at the brickworks at Crackley - the site of today's tennis club. From the mid 1870s this works was operated, along with a nearby quarry, by Edward Smith, a builder who amongst many buildings in town was responsible for the Local Board of Health offices, today's' number 6, Upper Rosemary Hill.

Smith's builder's yard was on the corner of School Lane and Rosemary Hill, his storeroom was incorporated in the construction of Rosemary Mews.

In 1872, Walter Lockhart took on a lease for a brickworks at Whitemoor and produced the first Kenilworth bricks known to have carried the town's name. Lockhart installed a railway siding into his works and Kenilworth brickmaking had at last become a major industry. Briefly in the 1880s the works was taken over by the Leamington and Lillington Brick Company before being taken on by Henry Hawkes, a member of the Stoneleigh family who had owned the land throughout the brickmaking years.

In 1881, Thomas Hawley, who lived at Park Hill, successfully applied to build brick-kilns on land he owned that was then in use as a market garden known as The Cherry Orchard.

It was to be seven years until the kilns were put up, in the name of a company Mason and Dall; a railway siding was quickly added. The brickworks, soon renamed The Cherry Orchard Brick Company, took up only part of the site, the market garden continued for a number of years afterwards.

Not surprisingly, the brickworks were perhaps the most dangerous of places to work in Kenilworth. Accidents ranged from a young lad who caught his leg in the revolving "knives" that thrashed the clay and had to have his leg amputated up to his thigh, to a man who died when a new boiler fell on him.

Even away from the machinery workers were not safe; in the pits clay-falls regularly caused broken bones, one man lost three fingers when a stick of dynamite blew up in his hand, and another died from sunstroke.
All this and more in just a 20-year period at the end of the 19th century.

The 20th century saw the Cherry Orchard and Whitemoor brickworks firmly established with good reputations, the Cherry Orchard in particular for engineering bricks.

During the Second World War the drying sheds were used for wartime storage and even small parts production. In the early post-war years, the Cherry Orchard was rebuilt using prisoners of war for labour, but the Whitemoor works did not modernise and closed in the mid-1950s. The Cherry Orchard continued until 1977.

The last of doubtless many buildings in Kenilworth known to be built with Kenilworth bricks are the flats known as "The Towers" on Park Hill; about a fifth of a million of them were delivered to the site from Cherry Orchard.

Cheery Orchard bricks are prized even today; one local building firm in town makes a point of putting a single Cherry Orchard brick just above the fireplace of every house they build.

Find out more about Robin Leach's Kenilworth books by visiting his website:
www.Victoriankenilworth.co.uk