Man with Britain's biggest brick collection looks for a museum to house all 4,000

SWNS

A man with Britain's biggest brick collection is looking for a museum to house them all - as it swells to over 4,000.  Mark Cranston, 62, began the bizarre hobby nearly fifteen years ago when he was looking for a brick as a doorstop for his garden shed.  He found a white painted brick from a former colliery and the discovery inspired the retired police sergeant to look into the history of the brick.  His passion for them grew from there and over the last fourteen years, dedicated Mark has amassed a huge collection from Scotland, England, Wales and abroad.  He stores the rare bricks in his garden shed which the dad-of-two has had to extend over the years as his collection grew at his home in Jedburgh, Scottish Borders.

Transcript

00:00My name is Mark Cranston, I live in Jerboa in the Scottish Borders. This started off

00:07as a hobby back in 2010. The first brick collected was a Whitehill, which was manufactured just

00:13outside Edinburgh. And 4,000 or so bricks later, the latest edition is the Rossite brick,

00:21which is quite a rare brick to find actually, so that was donated very recently. So the

00:26idea of this brick collection is it's a niche way of saving a part of Scottish industry

00:33of old. We don't have a brick manufacturing industry these days. It was once a really,

00:38really important industry for Scotland, and we exported bricks all over the world. One

00:43company in particular, manufacturing bricks, actually exported to 120 different countries,

00:48and that was just on its own. So they played an important part in the Industrial Revolution.

00:54Particularly the fire bricks, as they were sent all over the world to be used in industries,

01:00from making glass, making iron and steel, chemicals, you name it. There's over 4,000

01:05pieces in it. I have an associate brick collector, Ian Sotheby, who's got an equally big collection,

01:11and between us there must be at least 6,000 plus items that we could exhibit in the museum,

01:19which is the ultimate goal for us. We feel it's an important collection for Scotland. There's

01:26nothing else like it. Museums existing at the moment don't have it, so it needs to be saved,

01:30and it needs to be exhibited, because there's a story to tell here that many folk don't know about.

Category

Transcript

Comments

Recommended