Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Keir Starmer’s Labour government is calling for 1.5mn homes to be built in the UK in the next five years — an increase of 80,000 a year on top of current levels and potentially the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation. It is aiming for homes that “increase climate resilience and promote nature recovery” and will respect local history and character. This raises the question, what will they be built from? What local materials provide durability and sustainability without breaking the bank?The clay brick is unlikely to be the answer. British production has been in decline since 2008 when the financial crisis led many brickworks to close. The UK is now importing more bricks than ever before — 500mn in 2022 — more than any other country in the world. Firing and importing them contributes to a global total of 288,190 tonnes of emissions per year.As a result, building in brick is increasingly unsustainable. A possible alternative can be found on a former farmyard in Dorset. Here, Steve Moore and Alexandra Geen are building a house with bricks made not from clay, but from Portland stone. Unlike that found on the grand Georgian buildings of London, Manchester and Bath, its colour tone is highly varied and the surfaces are pocked with fossils. This supposedly imperfect stone would not typically be considered uniform enough for a facade. Yet turned into bricks, it takes on a striking quality. “Our building control officer said it was the most beautiful brickwork he had ever seen,” says Moore. “It looks like a tapestry; you can see all the lovely intricacies of nature.”This is an example of what suppliers call “unloved stone”: the offcuts from quarrying the premium stone we are more familiar with. It is just as strong and durable as any other stone, but its non-uniformity makes it more affordable. And, as Moore and Geen found, it can still be just as impressive.In quarries up and down the country, including some long abandoned, huge piles of unloved stone are waiting to be put to use. Michael Poultney, managing director of Portland stone supplier Albion Stone, estimates the volume in his quarries is around 80,000 tonnes. “We think it’s enough to actually build St Paul’s Cathedral from stock,” he says. “I’m having to put it back into the mine I took it out of.”Now, suppliers like Albion are investing in machinery to cut this stone into bricks. According to Poultney, the carbon footprint is 75 per cent less than a typical fired clay brick In production, energy is only needed for extracting the material from the ground and cutting it up. With unloved stone, half of that process is already accounted for. More carbon savings can be found by sourcing the stone from local suppliers. Clay bricks require the processing of other ingredients such as sand, lime, cement or fly ash — as well as the energy cost of firing and shipping. “Bricks are already higher carbon and now we’re importing them from India and China; it’s ludicrous,” says Poultney.As stone suppliers shift to electric machinery, the carbon footprint of stone bricks will probably reduce even further. Amin Taha, founder of London-based architecture studio Groupwork, estimates the reduction at around 97 per cent. He built his own home and office, the RIBA Award-winning 15 Clerkenwell Close in London using the material. “If we clicked our fingers and overnight everybody started specifying stone bricks instead of fired clay, the UK alone could save a similar amount of carbon as the entire annual emissions of a country like Ghana,” he suggests. “Before you know it, we stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution.”Taha is vocal about the advantages of turning stone into bricks. His building features a facade of huge limestone columns and beams that carry a large portion of the building’s structural weight. To install them, he worked with a specialist stonemason, French-trained Pierre Bidaud of Rutland-based The Stonemasonry Company. He came to realise that, if stone was cut to standard brick dimensions, it could be assembled by any bricklayer. That would mean even the UK’s biggest housebuilders, like Barratt Homes or Taylor Wimpey, could start building in this material.Taha believes that stone bricks are the key to reviving a form of construction that has a long history. “If you go to somewhere like Stamford [in Lincolnshire], or some of the prettiest villages in the Cotswolds, you see entire streets made of stone,” he says. In some areas, stone bricks could be the key to delivering the very local character that the government wants.So with all these benefits, why aren’t more people building in stone?There are still some question marks around cost. With stone suppliers still testing the market, a brick in unloved stone is less expensive than a premium clay brick, but it’s certainly not the cheapest product around.A trickier obstacle is that of perception. Ever since the arrival of steel and concrete in the early 20th century, stone has increasingly been used as cladding rather than as load-bearing walls. This is despite being a material that works best in compression not suspension, essentially in carrying weight rather than being weight. It has created an image of stone as a luxury surface finish, driving demand for more uniform varieties, leaving anything short of perfect to be rejected and creating a lot of surplus.Marcus Paine is keen to reinstate the perception of stone as a utilitarian material. Paine is managing director for Hutton Stone, a supplier of sandstone with quarries in the Scottish Borders and North Northumberland. This year the company received a grant from the South of Scotland Enterprise’s Net Zero Accelerator Fund, which it has invested in its stone brick production. Paine believes that, if the building industry embraced the natural variations and irregularities of stone, it could become the ultimate low-cost, low-carbon building material. “If we accept stone in those terms, it suddenly becomes the cheap product that it was 150 years ago,” he says. Hutton is currently working with architects Buckley Gray Yeoman on a proposal for a social housing scheme in east London. Paine hopes it will become visual proof of how, in brick form, the material imperfections become imperceptible. “All the visual challenges become irrelevant,” he says. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle; because it’s all little pieces, you’re not offended if there are brown streaks or iron marks. It means you can use everything.”An installation for the Clerkenwell Design Week festival in May offered a sense of how this could look. Designed by architecture practice Artefact, this three-metre-high structure took the form of a colonnade, using stone bricks supplied by both Albion and Hutton. Artefact co-founder Daniel Marmot is convinced that stone bricks can play a crucial role in meeting housebuilding targets while also lowering the nation’s carbon footprint. He believes stone could generate growth in the construction sector while also helping to decarbonise. “If we invest in the production of building materials, we catalyse growth in regional economies, creating jobs and skills in the process,” he says. “If the price comes down, my feeling is that their use will become astronomical.”
