1903: Today saw an extension to Peterborough's growing tram network when the service to Newark began, the trams travelling along the Eastfield Road. The driver - the motorman - had to stand in an open area to drive the tram and was exposed to all weathers. He worked a ten-hour shift, six days a week, at a rate of 5d an hour, which provided him with a weekly wage of 25s. (Peterborough Advertiser)
Taken from The Peterborough Book of Days by Brian Jones, The History Press, 2014.
Peterborough benefits from a type of clay that provides an ideal raw material for brick making. First exploited by the Romans, it was abandoned after they left and again revived in the 1400’s by local craftspeople who created the material for building locally.
In 1877 James McCallum Craig bought a property at auction near Peterborough, known as Fletton Lodge. He decided that the site was ideal for local brick making and started a small company. When excavation of the surface clay at Fletton began, a much harder clay was found deeper down, the unique Lower Oxford Clay. It was locally known as the ‘Fletton’ because of its original place of manufacture, but its main market was in London, transported there on the Peterborough to London rail line, so giving the name London Brick.
The end of the First World War in 1918 brought a huge demand for London Bricks to fulfil the massive increase in house building and in the late 1920s there was an amalgamation of several small companies into a larger, more efficient company, London Brick. By 1931, 1,000 million bricks a year were being produced.
After World War II there was another building boom and this increased the success of the company; demand for bricks far outstripped supply and by the early 1950s many workers were being recruited from as far afield as Italy to satisfy the need for London Bricks.
Alfred Nicholson Leeds was the person that found the first ever Leedsichthys fossil fish bones. He was a pioneer in methods of collecting and preserving fossil skeletons in the latter half of the 19th Century. For nearly half a century he devoted his leisure to recovering the remains of fossil reptiles and fishes from the brickpits in the Oxford Clay near Peterborough. By his death in 1917, Alfred Leeds had excavated and sold literally thousands of Oxford Clay vertebrate fossils from around Peterborough to museum collections in countries around the world including Germany, Sweden and the United States.