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Three Brickworks at Nowton or Welnetham or Sicklesmere
The sites of these pits and kilns are off the A134, Sudbury Road, between Bury St Edmunds and Sicklesmere.
A publication that helps to explain this concentration of Brickworks is "SCC Suffolk Landscape character - undulating arable landscape with parklands and ancient woodland."
"In the Hoxnian Interglacial there was a lake in a hollow on the surface of the Anglian till at Sicklesmere. The lacustrine clays that in filled it were exploited by a brick works in the 19th century while Roman kilns in the same area suggest an earlier exploitation of this resource."
This also means that these clays might contain evidence of early man, and John Wymer has suggested that four handaxes came from the Oakes clay pit, but exact provenance is not available.
The 1885/6 OS map illustrated here, clearly labels the area as Little Welnetham, but we do not acknowledge that name with the brickworks location.
The brickworks located on the map attached to this section have been variously described in official records as located at Little Welnetham, Sicklesmere and as Great Welnetham. One directory lists Andrews works at Rushbrooke.
All these parishes are closely linked and the boundaries may well have changed over the years.
From examination of the 1886 OS map attached it can be seen that there appears to be at least two, and probably three brickworks in an area labelled as Little Welnetham, which has no doubt added to the overall confusion.
The first of these three, which is examined on this page, is the Nowton Estate Brickworks of James Oakes.
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The second map shows the parish boundaries as they were around 1850 outlined in blue, with names also in blue. The red outline shows parish boundaries by 1996. The blue outline shows these three brickworks within the parish of Nowton, although the nearest settlement is the village of Sicklesmere. Sicklesmere has never been a parish in its own right. Today it is part of Great Welnetham parish. In the mid 19th century Sicklesmere was partly in Nowton and partly in Great Welnetham. |
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This map extract from the 1884 edition of the 25 inch series by Ordnance Survey shows the brickworks that is believed to be James Oakes Nowton Estate brickworks. This works is no longer shown on the 1904 revision issued by OS. |
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The Suffolk HER locates the main or largest works as "Monument Record WLL 008 - Oaks Kiln, Sicklesmere, (Paleolithic)", in civil parish Great Welnetham. The record specifically refers to "Former brickworks pit containing late Hoxnian peat deposits and four handaxes." This record is concerned, not with the brickworks per se, but with the Paleolithic remains recovered from the pit by archaeologists. |
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If we ignore the spelling, we can surmise that this was the brickworks of James Oakes, who lived at Nowton Court. Martyn Fretwell writes:-
"James Henry Porteus Oakes (b1821) of Nowton Court, Bury St. Edmunds operated his estate brickworks from 1875 to the year of his death in 1901. The Oakes family were also bankers in the firm of Oakes, Bevan & Co. (later Oakes, Bevan, Tollemache Co.) which was taken over by the Capital & Counties Bank in 1900. Capital & Counties Bank was then acquired by Lloyds Bank in 1918. Info & Photographed at the Museum of East Anglian Life by Martyn Fretwell."
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Alfred Andrews had a brickworks at Eastgate Street in Bury St Edmunds from 1860 to 1886.
The bricks are marked ‘A.ANDREWS BURY’ in the frog. Alfred Andrews also had a works at Sicklesmere, to the south of Bury St Edmunds, producing red bricks and to identify them from the Bury production these were marked ‘A.A’ in the frog. William Rushbrooke had been running the Westley Road Brickworks in Bury from 1887, when he bought it, until 1892. It appears that the supply of clay was running out at Westley, and so in 1892 Rushbrooke closed the Westley works and took over a brickworks at Sicklesmere.
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British Brick Society newsletter "Information No 26", April 2014,
Website - David Kitching's website - Brick Section
Website - Martyn Fretwell's blog on bricks etc
Photos of bricks by Martyn Fretwell courtesy of Museum of East Anglian Life.
Page created on 21st August, 2023
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