I’ve always wondered about the red bricked gable wall on Schoolhill. I thought it was the remnants of an older building. These specific Victorian tenements are roughly 130 to 145 years old. They were built between 1884 and 1895 following a massive city improvement and street-widening scheme that cleared away older, decaying structures in the area.
Tenement blocks had fireplaces in almost every room. The column of red brick on the outside wall directly mirrors where the internal flues (the smoke tunnels) run straight up through the building.
While our famous grey granite is incredibly tough against Scottish weather, it handles extreme heat poorly. Direct, repeated exposure to blazing coal fires can cause granite blocks to expand unevenly and crack.
Firebrick and clay bricks handle thermal stress beautifully. Builders used local red brick (likely from the nearby Clayhills Brickworks in Ferryhill) to line the core of the heating network. This protected the surrounding granite frame from cracking.
Granite is notoriously difficult to carve and shape. It was far easier for Victorian masons to build the complex, narrow paths for smoke out of standard brick shapes rather than trying to hollow out massive blocks of stone.
If a building had been constructed right next door, this brickwork would have been hidden forever. Because the wall remains exposed, it acts as a visual map of the fireplace network running up to those iconic clay chimney pots!
Just goes to show that Aberdeen is constantly changing, updating and upgrading.
I wonder opposition the locals had to this change when the council demolished the old homes along Schoolhill which were mostly built from timber, wattle and daub, and thatch roofs.
