16/03/2024
We don't normally do drastic things like rebuilding a whole elevation, but in this late Victorian house in Hampstead, built adjacent to a boggy Hampstead pond, the rear facade had dropped by 150mm and was causing some extreme distortion and failures and not in a charming "Crooked House" kind of way, but in a terrifying - here is a crack in the brickwork that I can put my hand in - kind of a way. A note on a map from 1750 showed that the whole area had been used as "pleasure grounds" with a charming grotto built around a natural spring, so perhaps it was no surprise that this had not provided the soundest of foundations. Another clue was that the facade of the adjacent house had been rebuilt in the 1970s. Not that this stopped the neighbours strenuously objecting to our plans and trying every possible measure to hold up the party wall process. We were all just grateful that they did not implement their rather startling threat to "Stand naked in the rear garden" as a protest.
If that was the nadir, things improved from then. We found we were able to re-use all of the existing bricks, turning them round so that the better faces faced outwards, and the bricklayer created new gauged brick "rubbers" for the brick arches. We used lime mortar to match the existing and a sponged pointing detail that does not look too glaringly new. Of course the rebuilding gave us an opportunity to insulate the rear wall with a cavity.
Working with the Camden Council Conservation officer, without altering the balance of solid wall and void too much we subtly increased the size of all the windows; the first floor windows now have thin brick pillars in between them bonded to a cast concrete inner column, the top floor is a custom-made double sash. We capped the rebuilt gable with a limestone coping matching the new limestone window cills. We were incredibly lucky to be working with Copués Construction, who turned out to have a deep well of knowledge and enthusiasm for brickwork.
The whole new rear facade was underpinned to nearly 4m depth, with a system of holes left for the spring water to drain through and should be good for another 150 years. In fact it is quite likely to be standing when the rest of the terrace has sunk like Venice beneath the ponds.
