Feeder Bin House

The feeder bin house at Box Hill Brickworks is a substantial metal structure, its surfaces corroded and its paint long since peeling away in layers. Dust settles across the machinery below it. Nothing here has moved since the plant closed permanently in August 1988. The brickworks at Box Hill has its roots in the 1880s land boom, when a belt of brickmaking operations spread east from Melbourne through clay-bearing suburbs between Hawthorn and Mitcham. The Haughton Park Brick Company Ltd issued its prospectus in 1884, proposing to produce machine and hand-made bricks, tiles, earthenware and porcelain on a 30-acre site at the corner of Elgar and Canterbury Roads. Production suspended in 1892 amid the broader colonial depression, resumed around 1911, and the company was formally reconstituted as the Standard Brick and Tile Co. Ltd in 1913, when an 18-chamber Hoffman patent kiln was constructed on the site. The Hoffman kiln allowed continuous firing: bricks loaded into one chamber while others cycled through heating, firing and cooling. The plant was converted from steam to electricity in 1952. The Co-operative Brick Company had taken over the works in 1938, and Brick and Pipe Industries absorbed the Co-operative in 1966, bringing Box Hill under national-scale industrial ownership for its final two decades of operation. The Victorian Heritage Register listed the site in 1989, describing it as a rare and unusually intact brickmaking plant of the early twentieth century. The citation notes that the site retains material evidence of all stages of the brick production process, from clay extraction to dispatch. Box Hill Brickworks is recorded as the last historic remnant of the major brick and tile producing region between Hawthorn and Mitcham that flourished from the 1880s through to the First World War. This photograph was made in 2011.