A NORTH Yorkshire independent brickmaker has been shortlisted in national awards that celebrate the best examples of clay brick in the built environment.

The York Handmade Brick Company, based at Alne, near Easingwold, was shortlisted in both the Individual Housing and the Refurbishment categories of the 2022 Brick Awards.

The company provided the bricks for Green Acres, a stunning new detached house in Effingham in Surrey, and for Holy Trinity Church in the heart of Sunderland.

The Brick Awards will be presented at a glittering ceremony at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London’s West End on Thursday November 10. Run by the Brick Development Association in conjunction with Building magazine, they are the brick industry’s Oscars.

York Handmade Chairman David Armitage said: “We are tremendously proud to have been shortlisted for these two fantastic projects this year.

“Huge thanks are due to the management team and employees at York Handmade for their imagination, enterprise and hard work, which all combined to make these projects so successful and so memorable.

“It is vitally important to stress that these two shortlisted entries are completely different jobs in design and execution, graphically illustrating our ability to work in a wide variety of colours and styles. We believe we can tackle any brickwork project successfully.”

The company played a pivotal role in the conservation-led restoration of Grade I listed Holy Trinity Church in the heart of old Sunderland. This restoration has transformed Sunderland’s first parish church and civic hub into a spectacular space for connecting and sharing people, stories and heritage through conservation repair and sensitive adaptation.

Holy Trinity, which was built in 1719, is a very early Georgian, Grade I listed church, which had been closed since 1988. Since completion, the building has been removed from Historic England’s At Risk Register.

Green Acres is located in the picturesque Surrey village of Effingham and is a new house in the Georgian style. The old house was demolished and reset in the existing grounds with the new house featuring five bedrooms and five bathrooms, with the addition of stables and garages.

York Handmade provided 30,000 traditional bricks, suitable for the neo-Georgian house.

The company was highly commended for its work on St Albans Cathedral in last year's Brick Awards and for both the Peter Hall Performing Arts Centre at Perse School in Cambridge and the Loxley Stables residential housing project in Hertfordshire in 2019.