Brickwork Direct has picked up £10m worth of work in the past six weeks alone – which is more than its entire 2021 turnover of £7.5m.

Brickwork Direct employs 25 staff at its headquarters in South Shields and has close to 200 bricklayers on its books. Clients include Gentoo, Keepmoat, Esh, Story Homes, Avant Homes and Partner Construction. It is also a preferred contractor for Darlington Borough Council. It operates solely in the northeast region, from Alnwick down to Teesside.

Over the last six weeks, the company has picked up five sites for Miller Homes with a labour value of over £4.2m and four sites for Story Homes at Dunston, Alnwick, Darlington and Stockton. With others in the pipeline for Gentoo in Whitburn and Sunderland, it has secured projects with a total labour value in excess of £10m.

Managing director Ken Collins is a time-served bricklayer himself with more than 40 years of experience in the trade. He worked as a sole trader on various schemes across Europe before establishing Brickwork Direct in 2003. He is familiar with the fluctuations of the industry.

“By mid-September we will have 50 squads of three staff (a labourer and two bricklayers) out on site on numerous projects across the region and we have another 12 projects, mainly with housebuilders, ready to negotiate,” he said.

The market was sluggish at the start of the year, he said, with the estimating team, led by quantity surveyor Nick Wilson, tendering for every project that came their way. These efforts are only now starting to pay off.

Although the cost of materials seems to have flattened out after a period when some suppliers would only guarantee costs for a matter of days, there are still challenges ahead, Ken Collins believes.

“There is a huge shortage of kiln-fired bricks, which are the best you can buy. You’re talking £700 per thousand compared to £400 per thousand for cold-cast concrete bricks. Then there is the time it takes to get deliveries – you can get a cold-cast brick to site in 10 days, but it takes four weeks to get a kiln-fired supply. So even though they are of an inferior quality, and more difficult to lay because they have a narrower edge, unfortunately they are becoming the norm.

“I also think we are looking at a downturn in the not-too-distant future, so I am delighted with these recent wins although we are still out there pushing for the next contract so that I can keep as many of our bricklayers employed as possible with the work we have already had confirmed.”

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