Editing Yiewsley (section)

====Yiewsley's brick Industry====
[[File:Yiewsley Colham Avenue 1.jpg|thumb|upright|Trees line Colham Avenue, formally part of the southern section of the [[Otter Dock]]]]

The building of the canal enabled the bulk transportation of what became known as [[London stock brick|Cowley (or London) stock bricks]], made from Yiewsley's rich deposits of brick-earth. The first record of the sale of significant numbers of bricks in Yiewsley is shown in the ''Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser'' of the 24 March 1809, advertising an auction of upwards of one million bricks owned by W.M Pope situated at a site adjoining the canal.<ref>{{cite news |title=Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser |date=24 Mar 1809}}</ref> In 1820 a branch of the canal known as [[Otter Dock]] was opened. It would become the longest of nine arms and docks that were constructed in Yiewsley to service the outgoing transportation of bricks and the importing of coal from the Midlands to fire Yiewsley's clamp [[kiln]]s. The finished bricks were then transported mainly along the Grand Junction Canal to South Wharf in the [[Paddington Basin]] and to wharves along the [[Regent's Canal]], but also to other locations along the canal and River Thames.<ref name="BBS" /> 

Although figures for Yiewsley's brick production in the nineteenth century are not available, in July 1879 brickmaker Samuel Pocock stated at a committee of the House of Commons discussing the proposed [[Slough Arm|Langley and Slough Branch of the Grand Junction canal]] that he had purchased his West Drayton brickfields (south of his existing Hillingdon Parish brickfields at Starveall) in March 1874 and had been making 15-20 million bricks per year.<ref>{{cite news |title=The Proposed Langley and Slough branch of the Grand Junction Canal |publisher=Buckinghamshire Advertiser, Uxbridge and Watford Journal |date=12 July 1879 |pages=3}}</ref> By the 1890s it is estimated 100 million bricks per year were being produced in West Middlesex supplying the demand for building materials of [[Victorian era|Victorian]] [[19th-century London|London]].<ref name="BBS">{{cite journal |last1=Hounsell |first1=Peter |title=Up the Cut to Paddington: The West Middlesex brick industry and the Grand Junction Canal |journal=The British Brick Society |date=February 2004 |volume=93 |pages=11–16 |issn=0960-7870}}</ref> With this high production rate the deposits of brick-earth began to become depleted around the turn of the century. Brick-earth was still being extracted from Hide Field to the east of Yiewsley in 1913 but by 1930 the Stockley brickworks were producing only 2 million bricks a year. The brickworks were closed in 1935,<ref name="VCH Volume 4 p75-82" /> but the underlying gravels and sands continued to be extracted until the 1970s.