Lit Stairs

The staircase in this photograph sits inside the Former Standard Brickworks at 14 Federation Street, Box Hill, Victoria. Concrete, worn at the treads, crumbling at the edges. Sunlight comes through gaps in the structure above and strikes the steps at a hard angle, leaving the surrounds in shadow. Nothing has moved here in a long time. The site has a long and layered history. Brick production at Box Hill began in 1884 when the Haughton Park Brick Company Ltd proposed to work 30 acres at the corner of Elgar and Canterbury Roads. The company changed hands more than once before production suspended during the depression of the 1890s. Around 1911 the kilns reopened, and by 1913 the works had been formally reconstituted as the Standard Brick and Tile Co. Ltd. The centrepiece of that phase was an 18-chamber Hoffman patent kiln, a continuous-firing design that kept bricks moving through heating, firing and cooling in overlapping cycles. The plant changed hands again in 1938 when the Co-operative Brick Company took it over, closed during the Second World War, reopened in 1946, and converted from steam to electricity in 1952. By 1966 it was part of Brick and Pipe Industries. It closed for good in August 1988. What the photograph records is a structure that has been standing still ever since. The Victorian Heritage Register entry, gazetted 20 September 1989, describes the site as a rare and unusually intact brickmaking plant of the early twentieth century, one that retains evidence of every stage of production from clay extraction to dispatch. The staircase is part of that fabric: unremarkable in function, but present, holding its shape, holding the light.