I have found no descriptions of the brickworks on the Heath from this period, but in 1852 Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House. This fictional property was situated in the countryside to the north of St Albans, close to some brickworks, and he may well have been thinking of the brickworks on Bernards Heath when he wrote:

On the waste, where the brick-kilns are burning with a pale blue flare; where the straw-roofs of the wretched huts in which bricks are made, are being scattered by the wind; where the clay and water are hard frozen, and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day, looks like an instrument of human torture;- traversing this deserted blighted spot, there is a lonely figure ...

He later described the homes of the brickmakers:

I was glad when we came to the brickmaker’s house; though it was one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brickfield, with pigsties close to the broken windows, and miserable little gardens before the doors, growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there, an old tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. … … … now lived together in another house, made of loose rough bricks, which stood on the margin of the piece of ground where the kilns were, and where the long rows of bricks were drying.