Bungaroosh

Before working on Bungaroosh, there is a need to understand how it was originally made and why!

Construction. Bungaroosh is made principally of limes, gravel/flint shards, coarse sands and large field flints, always with brick snap courses/fragments or other deck derived rubble added in. The combination forms a type of lime concrete, loosely speaking. Bungaroosh offered an easy and proven way to create a wall that was strong, durable, cheap and was usually designed to be rendered. In Brighton and Hove, it was mainly used for garden walls and the party or rear walls of terraced houses, although it is also found as the infill in front elevations between the sill and head panels of windows.

A very short history  Lime rubble concrete has been around for thousands of years. The Romans used it (along with a lot of volcanic graded ash and pumice nodules*) to form the massive walls and domed roof of the Pantheon, which is still the largest unsupported lime concrete structure in the world. It became an important building material during the  late 18th to the early to mid 19th c.  Used to enable a  building boom in London Brighton and Hove because it was less expensive and helped to keep brick taxes down.* 

Why build in this stuff? To best answer this, you have to put yourself in the time of their constructions from long ago, up to the end of the Victorian period. Horses and carts were prevalent, and materials were taken from the closest and cheapest sources. Busted, under-fired, and bent bricks from the local clamp firing of the day were cheap. Flints from the fields of the Chalk Downs (farmers glad to see the back of them) were also very cheap. Created rubble and dust with hot lime, the mortar cost very little.

The Photos. These are all good examples, my booklet has a lot more if your keen!*