Nikolaus Pevsner defined in his Architectural Glossary (2010) a crinkle-crankle wall as “a garden wall undulating in a series of serpentine curves”. Crinkle-crankle is one of those wonderfully euphonious reduplicatives that appear willy-nilly in the English language, constructed from the word “crink” which was used in the 16^th century to mean twisting or tricky.

Pevsner associated this type of wall particularly with the county of Suffolk. In his website[1] Ed Broom has undertaken to identify, visit, and photograph all the county’s surviving crinkle-crankle walls. To date he has documented 105, with a further five to be confirmed, of which thirty-two have been listed to at least Grade II standard.

However, crinkle-crankle walls are not peculiar to Suffolk. There is a particularly fine example near where I live in the grounds of Frimhurst in Frimley Green in Surrey, once the home of the suffragette and composer, Ethel Smyth. Another is to be found on the corner of Branksome Park Road and Crawley Ridge in Camberley, sadly a shadow of its former self, partially demolished to make way for a housing development and what is left obscured by vegetation and estate agents’ signs.

Elsewhere around the country, there are examples to be found in Whitechurch Canonicorum in Dorset, Neston in Cheshire, and Egginton and Hopton in Derbyshire. Lymington in Hampshire boasts several, built thanks to the availability of cheap labour in the form of French prisoners, captured in the Napoleonic Wars, including one in Church Lane, marking the boundary between the lane and the garden of Elm Grove House,

Building continuous, wavy walls was a technique known to the Egyptians some four thousand years ago, archaeological records show, but it was probably only introduced to England in the 17^th century. Dutch engineers were hired to assist in the draining of the Fens to transform the marshes into farmland. As well as laying drainage and irrigation systems, they built brick walls, but to a very different design from that to which the locals were accustomed. Instead of a straight wall two bricks thick, the Dutch walls were only one brick thick and wavy. They were called slange muur, snake walls.

With their shallower foundations, the Dutch designed walls proved more adaptable to the conditions and with their series of alternate convex and concave curves, offered less of an exposed target to the winds that blew across the Fens than a straight wall did. An added advantage was that it took fewer bricks to build a wavy wall than a straight one.

A curvy wall gains all the support it needs from its sinuous shape, while a straight wall needs to be strengthened using buttresses in the form of a wide footing or supporting posts positioned every few metres. John D Cook explored the mathematics behind this phenomenon[2], but in essence, depending upon the amplitude of the curve, while the length of the curvy wall will be longer than a straight wall covering the same stretch of land, the quantity of bricks used in its construction will be reduced by anywhere between twenty and fifty per cent.

The number of bricks used to build a wall became increasingly important after 1784 and the introduction of the Brick Tax. Initially set at half a crown per thousand bricks, the rate rose to four shillings in 1794, then five shillings in 1797, before settling at 5s 10d a thousand from 1805 until its abolition in 1850. One way to mitigate the effect of the tax was to use a design requiring fewer bricks. The first half of the 19^th century when the Brick Tax was in force was the heyday of the crinkle-crankle wall, most of the surviving examples dating to this period.

In the days before greenhouses were common, crinkle-crankle walls offered horticultural benefits. Those built to run from east to west so that one side of the wall faced south to catch the sun, as well as increasing the area available for cultivation, provided by way of the alcoves created by the curves a sun trap and a windbreak. Known as forcing walls, they made it easier to cultivate more exotic and fragile fruits, such as grapes and peaches, while the northern side offered a cool place for storage.

Curvy walls, though, took longer to build and demanded greater skill of the bricklayer, two factors which meant that when the balance between the cost of materials and labour tilted in favour of the worker, the days of the crinkle-crankle wall were numbered.

Walls need not be bland and utilitarian. Perhaps it is time for a crinkle-crankle renaissance.

[1] http://www.freston.net/blog/?y=2016&m=01&d=04

[2] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/11/19/crinkle-crankle-calculus/