Garden full of bricks beneath the surface - should we remove before laying topsoil/lawn?

[StrongArm]

we have bought a victorian terraced house that has had nothing done to it since about 1980 at the absolute latest and some of the rooms have not been touched since 1960 and the man and his wife had lived here since the 1940s

they decided to put concrete slabs over the whole garden (60foot) but didn't concrete them in. What they did was put a whole load of builders rubble on the soil, then poured sand and soil on and then just flattened it and lay concrete slabs on top - I don't know when they did this but I would guess the 1970s

the garden was incredibly unsafe as the slabs were all uneven and sticking up so it's taken us a few weeks to remove all of them. We now have a slightly sloping garden but when we went to rake and flatten the soil, we started to pull up bricks

we are absolutely desperate to turf it now as we have a dog who is loving the mud but we are absolutely not loving it all coming in the house

I think we have 2 options - 1 is to go through the soil and remove as many of the broken bricks as we can (they are a few cms beneath the surface) and the other possibility is to just lay something like 10-15cm topsoil on top and then put the lawn down

does anyone have any experience with this? dp and I are leaning towards taking the bricks out but it's probably another few weeks of work for us (we both work full time and it's pretty tiring!)

It's like any household job: it's all in the preparation. You'll hate it at the time but thank yourself, repeatedly, in the years to come.
Do it.

Do it. You could hire a mini digger to help. Maybe take a Friday and Monday off and just get it all done over 4 days?

What will you do with the waste?

Unfortunately taking the bricks out is the only option - you either do it now or you'll find yourselves having to do it in a few years when the soil has settled unevenly and holds water in patches where there are bricks underneath or dries with odd patterns in it in the summer.

You also won't want the upheaval once the rest of the garden has started to mature, so best to do it now.

We had this in patches of our garden where rubble had been dumped. The grass really struggles to grow and all shrubs have died as they can't establish event roots.

We have hired a mini digger and excavated, putting a whole dumped patio (just below the surface in parts) into a large skip.

It would have been so much easier to have done this before rather than trusting unscrupulous landscapers.

So yes, I'd prepare the ground well and prevent a lifetime of everything you put down dying.

yes

you can buy or hire a rotary sieve or screen to reduce the effort. You shovel your soil in one end, the sieved soil comes out of the bottom, the stones and bricks come out of the end. Sometimes called a Trummel or Trommel (because it is a drum). I think if you can hire a builders' large one it will be better as you have such a lot. You will need a skip and a couple of barrows.

Doing it by hand is terrible work, and you will probably give up and just do the top two inches.

Or you could hire a groundwork company to scrape it out and skip the whole lot away. If you buy replacement topsoil it might not be very good unless you, or the vendor, screens it as above.

I agree with pp, removing the bricks will be worth it in long run.

However, am a bit concerned where you say you have a sloping garden but are flattening the soil. Please be mindful of drainage. Ideally you want the garden to slope downwards away from the house. You don’t want a flat, level garden or a garden sloping downwards towards the house. If you are on a hill and can’t help it sloping downwards towards the house, you will need to consider outdoor French drains or other means of diverting rainwater around the house walls and foundation.

thanks all

because it's mid terraced and we have no back access to the garden (back onto the railway), we can't get any major equipment through. That Trommel looks great, we could do with that but there is no way that is getting through the house. A rotary sieve might I think but these bricks are big - I'm talking about large old Victorian bricks, chopped up but in big slabs like three quarters of a big brick and they are heavy. Not like modern bricks at all. I am actually not strong enough to dig and get them up - we have to dig till we hit a brick, then pull it out, then dig again etc. It's very labour intensive.

for some reason, they stepped the garden but it was all totally uneven. After removing the concrete slabs, it's basically left sloping (slightly) back towards the patio outside the back of the house. I suspect the back half is higher because it has more rubble under it but we will only know once we start digging down. There are already drains in the patio (on the outside wall of the house) but at the moment, not much is running towards them. When we've finished, we'll have to take a view as to whether it needs a step or whether by removing the rubble, it's more level.

Sounds like we are just going to have to roll our sleeves up and get on with it!

How wide is the access, a mini digger can be a small as 50cm wide...

Are the bricks unsaveable? Someone might want some victorian brick bits ......maybe.....

I can see the line of an old path under my lawn; the strip of grass on top dies every summer. I'd dig it all up if you can be bothered.

the bricks are heavy because they are saturated with water.

there are some lovely blue victorian edging tiles that have been thrown in the mix - I've been pulling them out by hand and have them in a giant pile! In the main those are whole and match the roof so I will keep those. They are beautiful.

Also some victorian terracotta tiles but most of those are broken. Then the big, victorian red bricks - those are mainly chopped up. I haven't found one whole one of those yet but I'm also putting them in a separate pile!