Bricks and pieces: the blight of London’s fake facades

‘I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.’ So Augustus is supposed to have said. What would an emperor of London say today? ‘I found the capital a city of bricks and left her a city of rubble’? London bricks are falling down. Across the capital, brick facades are coming off in chunks. Like the Cadbury chocolate Flake, this is the crumbliest, flakiest brickwork.

I was all for the new brick city. I’m a brickwork bore. Away with glass, away with steel! Build back better, build back brick. When I saw brick buildings going up in new developments I cheered. I will bang on to anyone who will listen (most don’t) about fitness of materials, our vernacular heritage and the handsome nobility of London stock brick. I never expected that the brick wouldn’t stick.

For some of these brick buildings are only one brick thick. Photos posted by brick-twitchers online show great gummy gaps in the brickwork teeth. Call them fake-news facades. You recall the vogue for ‘exposed brick’ interiors? Peel off the wallpaper and make a feature of the red brick beneath? There wasn’t a Starbucks in the world without its warehouse-wall. Now comes the opposite: the exposed brick exterior. Only, under the brick there’s nothing but concrete and core. This is fur-coat-no-knickers architecture. Prosperous surface, tawdry foundations.

Sham facades are nothing new. I live on the top floor of a stucco terrace knocked up in the building boom of the 1840s. After a wet winter and putting off works through three lockdowns, our stucco portico is in a sorry state. You know the scene in The Phantom of the Opera when the Phantom’s smooth white mask is torn off and the skin underneath is revealed to be puckered and pock-marked and scarred? Well, that.