Follow the slag brick road

9:28am Saturday 19th April 2008

TOMORROW, I will be leading a walk across some dross. I shall be asking my companions to admire the slag beneath their feet and to rejoice at the large amounts of scum all around them.

It is this that makes our area unique. Millions of bricks made out of this dross, scum, slag and even excrement line the roads and cover the back yards of south Durham and the Tees Valley. They are not ugly. They are oil slick beautiful, containing a shiney rainbow of grey-blue hues.

They are properly called gscoria bricksh. Scoria comes from a Greek word meaning gexcrement or dungh. The Romans added a firey meaning as to them scoria was the dark lava wastefully tossed from a volcano (the light lava is pumice).

Metalworkers continued the evolution. When they smelted iron, scoria was the dross (gworthless materialh), the scum (gfoamy, frothy dross that rises to the surfaceh) and the slag (grefuse matterh).

Their beauty was that the scummy dross set shiney and hard at the top of the slag brick, so it could be hosed down and scrubbed clean of dungheap and slaughterhouse remains in a way that mud or stone couldnft.

To combat disease, posh areas in Darlington got the slag bricks in 1893; the Board of Health ordered them into poor areas in 1899. Indeed, there seems to be a slag bricks social scale. Poorest areas got a bog standard brick with no adornments. One rung up, middle class areas got a brick divided in two to break the monotony. At the top of the ladder was a brick divided into eight. I have only spotted it in a place as posh as Hurworth Green.

While I am unable to remember the birthday of my own daughter or mother, I can remember the precise location of the only scoria brick I have ever seen with writing on it. In Thursdayfs rain, I walked up the gutter of Priestgate and there it was, a brick in a billion, outside a solicitorfs office. In a semi-circle it says: gTees Scoria Brick Co Patent.h According to The Colliery Guardian of November 1873, this was a company newly-formed gfor the purpose of utilising the scoriae or slag from the blast furnaces, and working a patent taken out by Joseph Woodward of Darlingtonh.

It had erected experimental works beside the Clay Lane Blast Furnace in Eston, and had just gpronounced that the first bricks were all that could be wished, and to have exceeded the most sanguine expectations of the promoters of the companyh.

Where therefs muck therefs brass; where therefs slag therefs a small fortune.

The Guardian said that the slag poured out of the blast furnace into moulds and set in two minutes.

Then it was knocked out and the bricks were left in an oven for three days gafter which they are perfect, cool, solid and hard and ready for useh.

Stockton took the first order and to this day, scoria bricks line the lanes of the Tees Valley, from Redcar to Darlington and beyond.

Tomorrow, Ifm leading Darlington Historical Societyfs walk across dross, over scum and amid slag.

Everyone is welcome.

The walk around Curious Corners leaves from opposite Darlington College on Haughton Road at 1.45pm and lasts about 90 minutes.

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