Gantry

The gantry at Box Hill Brickworks is a frame of rusting steel beams and concrete uprights that has stood in the open air since the works closed in August 1988. Surface corrosion covers the steel along its length. The concrete shows the weathering of decades without maintenance. The structure was part of a compact site that the Victorian Heritage Register describes as retaining material evidence of all stages of brick production, from clay extraction to dispatch. The brickworks has its origins in 1884, when a prospectus was issued for the Haughton Park Brick Company Ltd on 30 acres at the corner of Elgar and Canterbury Roads, Box Hill. The company changed hands and names over the following years, becoming Box Hill Brick Co Ltd in 1886. Production was suspended in 1892 amid the broader colony-wide depression and did not resume until around 1911. In 1913 the company formally became the Standard Brick and Tile Co. Ltd, with an 18-chamber Hoffman patent kiln constructed on site. The plant was converted from steam to electricity in 1952. By 1966, the works had passed to Brick and Pipe Industries through its acquisition of the Co-operative Brick Company. The site was registered on the Victorian Heritage Register as VHR H0720 on 20 September 1989, one year after closure. The Victorian Heritage Register assessment describes Box Hill Brickworks as the last historic remnant of the major brick and tile producing region that spread between Hawthorn and Mitcham during the 1880s land boom. Every other works from that era has since been demolished or redeveloped. This photograph, made in 2011, records the gantry as it stood more than two decades into that long stillness: steel and concrete holding their form against the sky, the machinery gone, the structure remaining.