Levels, blown bricks, damp - yet again

[Starman]

We have a red-brick Victorian house fronting onto the Tarmac pavement. The bricks have been pointed with hard mortar.
The concrete floor is a good 6ins below street level. Previous owners have 'damp proofed' the internal wall with render.
I think the outside wall may also have been treated with waterseal.
Presumably because of all this many low-level brick faces are blowing, others have been badly repaired and the result is a mess.
How do I sort this? Cutting out more bricks is costly and brick matching tricky.
Could I maybe take out the mortar joints and lime render the bottom couple of feet of the wall?

 

[Zebra]

Not lime render the bottom couple of feet of the wall - you mean repoint in lime mortar, surely?

 

[Starman]

No, I meant lime render to create a plinth. Repointing will not solve the problem - there are a number of damaged bricks and other mis-matched bricks from an earlier repair.
Another patch repair would make the wall look even more messy. And it looks a sorry sight already!
My idea is to rake out the cement mortar across the bottom two feet of wall then lime render a plinth which would allow the wall to breathe and protect the bricks below it.

 

[TheForge]

Can you get any of the spalled bricks out whole and turn them around and simply reuse them?

 

[Zebra]

Ah. Yes, you could do that. You'd have to repoint in lime underneath the render, then render over the top. Might spoil the look of things a bit though, and I think mike's suggestion is better.

 

[Starman]

I'm not sure I'd get enough bricks out to reuse. The solid wall is rendered inside (classic damp company solution) and has that hard mortar so I think most bricks will be damaged.
I reckon I'd have to renew much of the face of the wall to get a tidy result - and getting bricks and new pointing to match the rest of the wall will be tricky too.
It's a bit of a dilemma really