While nothing is happening on the land, or something is happening behind the scenes, we decided to refashion our small garden here in London. It involved learning some major new skills: bricklaying, casting concrete, and cutting things with an angle grinder. We (I) started in December 2024 and finished half way through March.
The idea was to make better use of the most sunny place in the garden by building a raised bed in the far corner. Our first idea was to build the back of this bed out of gravel board and fashion a curved front from concrete. We realised that piling a few feet of earth against this wooden barrier was not a good idea. It would not take that long to rot, so a rethink meant that, of course, we should build it out of bricks. Enter an account with Selco which is 15 minutes drive away and cue the purchase of many bags of sharp sand, building sand, concrete bricks, engineering bricks, gravel and MOT.
Foundations did not need to be that deep – between 200 and 300mm. The thing was to make them absolutely level.
Once the gravel and other aggregates had set, I could start building the walls. The idea was that all the visible brickwork would be of concrete bricks. I’m not sure why we decided this because we ended up painting them a slightly darker colour at the end because they stood out too much. Once we had decided to use bricks we had the idea of having planks of wood to use as benches – one end on the brickwork and the other on piles/plinths, firstly of brick but then we decided of concrete.
We kept the gravel board in place – and later extended it across the entire back fence.
We knew the curved front wall would be a challenge but I bought some thin plywood that I could bend to the right shape and keep in place with a mixture of clamps and posts in the ground. First thing was to make a curved foundation.
Then build the structure for the wall on top – once it had set.
You can buy rebars at Amazon, believe it or not, and the mesh was something we had lying around, fixed to the brickwork at each end with ties from Selco.
I put removable barriers inside the form so I could try different mixes of sand and cement and other aggregates like gravel and MOT (not very successful). I could remove them once the first section had set and then move on to pour the next. All the concrete was hand mixed.
There was a young and fragile cherry tree in situ that made the work tricky. I ended up breaking only one branch in the process. Here are the four different mixes. Looking back I wish I had just used sharp sand and cement (5 to 1). Its the mix on the right. The yellow section is building sand and cement. The top is a layer of sharp sand and cement.
The next job was to form two concrete plinths for the planned benches to sit on.
The next job after that was to cut down one of the existing planters (there were two) made of Corten steel and turn it through 90 degrees and move it. This job put a strain on my cordless angle grinder meaning lots of changes of overheating battery. Also PPE was absolutely necessary for this job and even more so for the very dusty job of cutting bricks later on.
Actually moving the planter once it was reduced in size and bolted back together was not difficult. Once done we started redoing the existing paving before moving on to repave the rest.
We wanted to lay the paving bricks in curves, around the new raised bed and around the Eucalyptus tree in a circle. This meant cutting about 45 or so bricks which was a nasty job, mainly because of the huge amount of dust it made. I fashioned a kind of dust container inside the planter – lined with ply wood and plastic bags but everything ended up covered in dust including me.
Working out the layout was not straightforward.
The more-or-less last step was grouting the paving, in some places with earth where we wanted to grow some ground cover and in other places with sharp sand.
The circle of bricks around the tree is not quite finished in this picture.