The wall was never the problem.

Brick and lime. Repointed, rebuilt, or laid new. No cement, ever.Most walls that are "failing" are fine. The cement someone pointed them with in 1975 is what's failing, and it's taking the brick face with it. We take it out and put lime back.

Send a photo of the wall

01 · The bond

Flemish, course by course.

0 bricks

laid · lime 1:3 · struck joint

FootingThree courses, wide

DPCSlate, two courses up

BondHeader, stretcher, header

PointLime, brushed back

WeatherHessian, three days

Footing. Three courses, wider than the wall.Below ground, nobody sees it, and it's the bit that decides whether the wall's still plumb in a century. Lime, not cement, even here. Especially here.

Old red brick showing through crumbling grey render

02 · The numbers

What lime gives you.

1:3

lime to sand. Hydraulic or putty, depending on the wall and the weather it faces.

200 yr

the age of the walls we repoint most. They'd have lasted two hundred more without the cement.

cement. Not in the mix, not in the footing, not in the "just for this bit". It traps water. Water breaks brick.

courses a day, one bricklayer, done properly. Faster is the reason the last wall came down.

Red bricks stacked in a stepped pattern, deep shadows between them

The wall was never the problem.

Brick is soft. Lime is softer. Cement is harder than both, so when the wall moves, and every wall moves, the cement holds and the brick breaks. Take the cement out, put the lime back, and the wall does what it did for the first hundred years.

Works

Three things we do to walls.

Repoint the ones the cement is killing. Rebuild the ones it already has. Lay new ones the way the old ones were laid.

Repoint · lime · rake out by handRepointThe cement out, to twice the joint width, then lime back in

Raked by hand, not a grinder, because grinders take the arris off the brick. Pointed, struck, brushed back, kept damp for three days.

From £95/m²

Rebuild · reclaimed brickRebuildTake down, clean, re-lay in the bond it was in

For the wall that's past pointing. The bricks come down, get the old mortar knocked off, and go back up. Same bricks, same bond, lime.

From £340/m²

New wall · Flemish or EnglishLay newGarden walls, boundary walls, the odd extension

Handmade or reclaimed brick, a bond with headers in it, lime mortar, a coping that sheds water. The wall on the pin, basically.

By the metre · surveyed first

Lime

Why lime, every time.

Five things lime does that cement doesn't. All of them are the reason old walls outlast new ones.

A weathered red brick wall with pale mortar joints

It breathesWater gets into every wall. Lime lets it out again through the joint. Cement lets it out through the brick, which explodes in the first frost.

It movesBuildings settle, expand, shrink. Lime flexes with them. Cement cracks, and the crack is a gutter.

It healsHairline cracks in lime close up as free lime dissolves and re-sets. Nobody's worked out how to make cement do that.

It's softer than the brickThe joint should always be the weakest part. It's the bit you can replace. The brick isn't.

It comes offIn a hundred years somebody will repoint this wall again. Lime comes out with a chisel. Cement comes out with the brick face.

Send a photo

Send a photo of the wall.

One from across the road, one close enough to see a joint. We'll tell you whether it's the brick, the mortar, or the water, and what it'd cost to fix the right one. Usually it's the mortar.

Send a photo of the wall