Quarry, Clay, and Kiln: The story of Ketley

19th May 2023

“If I put these straight in the main dryers, they’ll just explode. And then I’ll have to make them all again!”

Brick Specials Maker, Steve Cartwright and I survey pallets of hand-finished canted bullnose brick – CPU tower-sized blocks of glistening chocolate-coloured Etruria marl clay. Steve effortlessly lifts an unfinished block, which must weigh ten kilograms, onto his worktable and takes out a cutting jig made from wood and cheese wire. He presses the wire into and through the clay, removing the right-angled edge of the brick to create a convex profile familiar to anyone who has sat on the wall of a town-centre planter.

Dreadnought Tiles and Ketley Brick products are ubiquitous in the UK, hiding in plain sight. You will have danced on their tiles on a night out, leant against one of their walls while waiting for a friend, rested your coffee carefully on the flat of their bullnose brick. If you’ve visited the Barbican, if you’ve walked along the Wembley Way, you’ve been on Ketley Brick.

In a time of disrupted supply chains and ballooning lead times, local solutions begin to look attractive; a fact that has not escaped Steve, “It looks like globalisation has come to a shuddering halt. It only makes sense to be able to source stuff from your own locality.”

With 10 miles separating quarry and kiln, Ketley is a highly localised manufacturer.

QHSE manager, Chris Dyke is showing me the piles of tipped clay that reach to the top of the quarry walls. It’s hard but friable and has a complex aroma. “When we’ve dug the clay, we make a stockpile and seal it by compacting it to make it weatherproof. It’s a bit like a Battenburg cake, really. Our geologist then takes core samples to determine the composition – the levels of silica and iron and other minerals.”

Once the clay arrives on site, it is crushed and ground into the grade required for each product, then mixed with water and extruded into shapes which are then hand finished where required. The iron-rich Etruria marl clay fires to a radiant red until the last thirty minutes when oxygen is reduced to produce different colours. “The iron in the Etruria marl clay is essential to create our blue. Other producers have to use a stain to achieve a similar effect.” Chris tells me. The blue is particularly striking and shimmers like the wing of a magpie. A stain just couldn’t come close.

The iron-rich Etruria marl clay fires to a radiant red until the last thirty minutes when oxygen is reduced to produce different colours.

Times change, but techniques, tools, and skills continue

The site sits in the void created by the original quarrying. From the eponymous Dreadnought Road, you look down onto a canopy of dusty corrugated roofs, occasionally punctured by a strut of machinery. The chug and whirr of the clay processing overlays the deep humming kiln. The site has been in production since 1805 and is so old that a major modernisation took place in 1906, when R.S. Davenhill joined Messrs Hinton and Perry to develop a new factory. The Davenhill family continue to manage Dreadnought Tiles and Ketley Brick at the executive level. I spoke to Mr. Richard Davenhill, 85, who recently stepped down as Chairman.

“My grandfather was a mining engineer and had been involved in tunnel engineering. In those days, a mining engineer would make his own bricks from suitable local clay for the project in hand. He answered an advert in The Telegraph to join Hinton and Perry in their brick and tile venture."

By the mid-1930s, Ketley were making 30 million tiles a year.

“After acquiring the land and building the factory, he, sadly, died. His son, my father, enlisted in the Worcestershire Regiment and went off to fight in the Great War at age 16. He was captured by the enemy but did survive the war and, when he returned, he joined the company, alongside Mr Perry.

“They were progressive in their approach to business and by the mid-1930s were making 30 million tiles a year. They built numerous rectangular coal-fired down-draught kilns. Fire holes ran down both sides at ground level, and two chimneys with dampers to control the air flow, were at either end. The kiln itself was filled from both ends then bricked up and sealed with wet sand. The fire holes were tended by kiln men who would drive horses and carts loaded with coal up between the kilns. Sometimes the fire holes would flare with the wind and set the horses tails smouldering, at which point you’d hear, ‘Eh! Yer ors is afire!’ and the sloshing of buckets.

“They used their profit to invest in innovative continuous coal gas-fired chamber kilns in the mid-1930s which put them ahead of the game. Of course, there wasn’t much production during WWII, but they were in a good position once the war ended.

“At that point Ketley Brick, who were adjacent to us became available for sale. We acquired them and asked the previous owner to come and work for us. Really, it was the acquisition of Ketley Brick that consolidated our success in the latter half of the 1900s."

“We’ve employed a lot of people over the years. Many of the industrious migrant communities in the Black Country started with us: Italians, Caribbeans, Pakistanis. We’ve also employed a lot of women, as they were seen as more dextrous at operating the tile presses than the men. Funnily, we’ve become a sort of heritage feature of the area, although we’re still very much a going concern."

“We still use the same traditional hand tools and methods within our heritage studio, but we also use the latest technologies to create bespoke textures and patterns and we’ve just introduced a new robotic handling system for sorting our quarry tiles once they’re fired."