Phoenix Farm Brickworks

CALSTOCK SX 37 SE 1/51 Phoenix Farm brickworks II Brickworks ; originally known as Phoenix Vitrified Paving and Firebrick Works. 1874. Limestone with brick dressings. Plan: Originally a rectangular building, roofed, with 2 panellel back walls and arched openings to the front. There were formerly beehive kilns to the front and a chimney. A railway line ran along the front of the brickworks, and there was a claypit to north and south. The rectangular building is about 30 metres by 20 metres, with the front wall surviving; this has 6 round arches with heads of 3 coursese of brick. There is a return wall to left about 5 metres long. Walls about 2 metres high. In the rear wall there is one similar arch to right. There was clay prospecting on Hingston Down in the 1860s, and the Phoenix brickworks started in 1874, built at a cost of £60000. They produced vitrified paving bricks for mews, slaughter houses etc, heavy duty blue bricks and glazed terracotta tiles. The brickworks operated the continuous burning Hoffman type kiln. In July 1875, a consignment of Phoenix bricks was sent to Kronstadt naval dockyard; the company terminated the lease 9 years later. The railway line was laid in 1873. Phoenix brickworks in marked on the 1906 Ordnance Survey map. Sources: Booker, F.: Industrial Archaeology of the Tamar Valley 1967.

Listing NGR: SX3964771613