Details, Details…

The official listing for Brockhampton Park in the Listed Buildings Registry (see ‘What is a “Listed” Building?’ in History) goes into a lot of detail about the features of the house, both exterior and interior. One paragraph refers to the rainwater downpipes on the south and east facades: “Several fine rainwater heads; barley-twist downpipe[s] with beast’s head on rainwater head[s] on south wall, 3 ornate rainwater heads with scallop shell motifs and lion’s head gargoyles on east front.” There is no record of when the rainwater goods were installed, but it’s fair to assume it was concurrent with the construction of that part of the house in the 1860s.

Beast’s head rainwater head on
south elevation.

Access box for cleaning.

Above: A rainwater head on the oldest part of the building, the southwest corner. It carries the initials PP, Paul Peart, for whom the house was built in 1641, and his coat-of-arms.

Scallop shell motif rainwater head on the east side.

Right: Access box on east side.
Far right: Original bracket
missing on the east side.

Over the many years, a number of the original fixing brackets for the downpipes have broken or corroded and a solution needed to be found to replace them. The support brackets around the rare, barley-twist downpipes on the south facade are unusual in that the parts secured to the wall each engage separately with a collar around the downpipe. They are a three-part assembly, not one bracket; moreover there are two size variations. Each ‘flange’ is cast with an English Rose motif (right).

Andy Doyle displayed his breadth of talent by devising new fixing plates and accepting the work to remove the old ones and install the new. He adopted a stonemason technique of setting a threaded, stainless steel rod in the wall and fabricated new, stainless steel plates to engage with the downpipe’s existing, unbroken collars (below).

Forming the new, stainless steel brackets.

Fitting old and new brackets to the existing collar.

Peter Long (Flat 8) became interested in the work while, at the same time, bemoaning the loss of the broken brackets carrying the rose motif. That’s when a light bulb went on in his head. Peter is a ceramicist and he had the idea to produce moulded castings of the motif that could be bolted over Andy’s flat plates, using the same threaded rod. The fixing nut would become the centre of the rose. Initially, Peter intended to use clay, but Johan Pretorius sourced a fibre-reinforced concrete compound that would function the same way and be, arguably, stronger. Peter went to work making silicone moulds from cleaned brackets supplied by Andy and using those moulds to produce trial castings.

The cast concrete rose motifs were immediately successful in accurately reproducing the old design. They are now fixed in place and, when painted, the new brackets and their rose decorated covers will be indistinguishable from the old. The downpipes on the east façade have completely different brackets, but it is possible that some modification of the original idea might suffice to restore the ones there that are broken or missing. One could argue that the project was a lot of work to fix a few downpipe brackets, but it is the small details that lend character to a place and, if of even minor historical value, they should be cared about and preserved. This is the mindset that should accompany every decision on the wellbeing of the house.

Left: The “dark” roses are the original cast iron and the white, the faux, concrete versions.

In the finished work, the new brackets are
indistinguishable from the old.

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