Building record HXN 121 - The Pipeworks, Eye Road

The old pipeworks lies in open countryside approximately 750 m south-west of Hoxne village on the eastern side of Eye Road. The site is internationally famous for the discovery by antiquarian John Frere of Palaeolithic tools during clay extraction in 1797, when the site operated as the brickworks of the Hoxne Hall estate (later renamed Oakley Park). An estate map of 1757 suggests that any earlier brick making occurred well to the north of the present buildings, which date from the 1930s and later. Of the structures shown on the Ordnance Survey of 1927 only fragments of a 19th century brick shed still stand today and the adjoining kiln has been replaced by a large cement-block vehicle shed. The surviving complex was built in the 1930s and underwent many alterations before the production of bricks and land drainage pipes ceased in the mid 1960s. A small down-draught beehive kiln of 8 m in total diameter with a detached chimney is the best preserved structure on the site, retaining its eight fire holes and some of its cast iron equipment including dampers, grates and ash-pit doors. It is shown in operation in a photograph of 1954 and may have replaced the previous kiln in response to wartime air raid regulations like many similar examples elsewhere. A series of brick and corrugated iron machinery sheds which contained extrusion equipment and a diesel engine had been emptied prior to inspection, leaving only a drum sieve in situ together with a small number of wooden brick moulds. The extrusion machinery is understood to have been acquired by a local collector. A long drying shed was re-roofed after a fire which left its timber posts and tie-beams badly charred, and was largely rebuilt in brick when a hot air drying tunnel was inserted. Despite these alterations the shed retains good mid-20th century industrial archaeology in the form of three pairs of iron rail tracks for transporting the drying racks, a track switching trolley, a hand winch and a hot air blower linked to the kiln. Two drying racks with bogey wheels also survive, along with a hand trolley depicted in the 1954 photograph and the base of a pugmill (S1).