Hetton Lyons Colliery Brickworks

A brickworks was opened at Hetton Lyons Colliery in 1881. The yard eventually had 15 Newcastle kilns, some holding 9,000 bricks during a firing, others 12,000.
In the 1930s, seggar clay was obtained for the bricks from the Low Main seam which, after 1945, had an increasingly high carbon content and the quality of bricks produced at the works was considered poor. From 1955, better quality clay was brought in from an opencast coal site near Cocken.
In the 1920s, bricks were wire cut. In 1926, a Dawson Fawcett machine press was installed which could make 10,500 bricks a day. In 1934, another similar Dawson Fawcett press was bought which produced bricks at a rate of 11,500 per day. About 25 people worked in the brickyard until its closure in 1958.
A new works, FR Bricks Ltd., was opened on the same site at Hetton Lyons in 1961 by Dr. Fitzgerald and Stewart Russell. It made calcium silicate bricks (a mixture of sand and lime) which were hardened by autoclaves not standard kilns. Machinery for the production of this type of brick, including two Duplex Emperor presses, was supplied by Sutcliffe-Speakman Ltd of Leigh, Lancashire. Annual production was about 13 million bricks.
1881-1958 and F R Bricks Ltd 1961