Structural repairs to cracked & damaged walls in Cambourne

Cracks in brick walls

Hairline cracks in mortar are common and often harmless. Cracks that run through the bricks themselves, step diagonally up the wall, are wider at one end than the other, or keep growing are the ones to take seriously, especially around windows, doors and corners.

For most structural cracks we use crack stitching: we cut slots into the mortar joints across the crack, bond in stainless steel bars (called helical bars) and repoint over them in matched mortar. It ties the wall back together as one piece and, done properly, you can’t see the repair afterwards. Any bricks cracked right through are cut out and replaced with matched ones.

Movement & subsidence

Much of South Cambridgeshire sits on clay, which shrinks in dry summers and swells again in wet winters. Add a thirsty tree near the house, or a leaking drain softening the ground, and foundations can move enough to crack the walls above. That’s subsidence, and it’s why cracks often appear or widen after a long dry spell.

Repairing the cracks won’t help if the cause is still active, so we look for it first. Where the movement looks ongoing, we’ll tell you honestly and advise getting a structural engineer and your insurer involved before any repairs. Once the cause is dealt with, we carry out the crack stitching, rebuilding and making good to put the walls right.

Broken bricks & damaged walls

Frost-damaged bricks with crumbling faces (called spalling), bricks broken by impact, walls clipped by a vehicle or damaged when something heavy was fixed to them. We cut out the damaged bricks and replace them with matched units, or take down and rebuild the damaged section so it ties back into the sound brickwork either side.

Leaning & bowing walls

A garden or boundary wall that has started to lean is usually down to shallow or failed footings, tree roots, or soil and water building up behind it. A leaning wall can go suddenly, so it’s worth looking at sooner rather than later. In most cases the right fix is to take it down and rebuild it on a proper foundation, reusing the original bricks where they’re sound so it still looks like the same wall.

On a house wall, bulging or bowing can mean the metal ties holding the two layers of brick together have rusted and failed. We can confirm it and install replacement wall ties to tie the outer skin back to the inner wall.