Building Practices in North West England C2006

By Chas Ambler

The houses up here, as any southerner knows intuitively, are small, terraced and gerry-built in 1876. I live in such a house, which is also – again typically – scheduled for demolition.

This fact has been a delight for me, as it has discouraged others from living on the street and allowed me to rehearse my very loud ten-piece soul band in the front room of my boarded-up house without causing comment.

This idyllic state of neighbourlessness (I can’t think why my spell-check has underlined that word) appeared under threat recently, when a loud knocking announced the presence of builders next door. I immediately turned the amp up to ten and started practicing an extremely annoying and repetitive atonal riff on one of the bad samples of a Blackpool theatre organ that litter my keyboard, hoping that reports of the hideous tonal landscape would leak out to any interested buyers.

I also quickly arranged for a rehearsal of the 28 piece orchestra that Your Dad, my ‘duo’, used on their recent gig up here in t’ North, hoping that the enormous quantity of comings and goings and weird collection of vehicles thus attracted would indicate the presence of drug dealers in the house. Additionally I invited the local kids in with inducements of cakes and cigarettes to give the impression of a large, dysfunctional family.

Unfortunately the builders maintained conventional working hours, so my coming in at 3 in the morning and immediately putting on my favourite CD of ‘Dance Anthems at 144bpm for 1998 Vol 4’ at wall shaking volume was redundant. I did it anyway. One day a neighbour will complain – and then we’ll know the area is at last becoming respectable, and I’ll have to move out. It’s what I particularly like about my street. The taxis only started daring to come down here a few months before I moved in, although personally I think the policy change was precipitate.

For the first couple of years I lived here I was never bothered by cold callers on the doorstep because they seemed to be put off by the large gang of drunken teenagers lounging around on the pavement. It is a matter of some pride to me that none of my friends seemed to notice them and would linger, chatting on the doorstep, as the teenagers tried to draw attention to themselves by shouting abuse and stabbing each other.

Despite their conventional hours, the builders did work on Saturday, and it was on a Saturday morning that I was disturbed in my bath by my son and his friends, who told me that holes had appeared in the wall of the living room and the place was smelling of petrol. Assuming the teenagers had returned with another pathetic attempt to attract my attention by fire bombing my house, I reluctantly climbed out of my bath and went downstairs. There were indeed holes in the wall and a strong smell of petroleum in the room.

“Oi” I shouted through the hole (I find it best to employ idiomatic speech on these occasions) “ what do you think you’re doing.” As it happened thinking was not what these particular builders were best at. “What do you mean?”. They appeared unsurprised at the loudness of the voice coming from the wall they had drilled through. “You’ve just drilled into my house.” “We can’t have.” “Look mate, I can see you through the bleedin’ ‘ole.” I find that in dealing with northerners it is always best to exaggerate my London accent, as I have found that everyone has a grudging respect for ‘cockneys’ and the more glottally stopped one’s voice is the harder they assume you to be.

The holes in the wall were not the main problem. These builders had an especially individual approach to damp-proofing (for that is what they were attempting to do). Unlike the average builder, who will drill into the brick about 2 inches and then saturate the brick with fluid, thus creating a damp resistant membrane in the brick, this particular order of ante-deluvian house fabricators considered it a superior technique to drill right through the brick and pump fluid into the cavity. They later assured me they had done this often before; thereby proving it must the right way. They had drilled until they felt the bit reach the cavity and then, unfazed by the light coming from the hole, connected the machine up and pumped the fluid in.

Had it not been for the fact that Bradford speculators in the 1870s didn’t believe in using two layers of brick where one could be got away with, their modern equivalents would presumably have carried on flushing expensive damp-proofing fluid down the cavities of walls indefinitely. Actually I think they probably will anyway, because when I told the young builder that his theory was wrong (when he came into re-plaster my wall – which uncharacteristically he did very well) he sounded very doubtful, much preferring his cavity procedure.

Although my wall has a lovely smooth finish, the room still smells like a Texaco filling station. The builders assure me I won’t get any trouble with rising damp. I trust them implicitly.

Chas Ambler
13 December 2006