Roofers in Barnsley

The roofs of Barnsley

Barnsley is where Roofline works from, so we know its roofs better than anywhere else on this site. The borough covers a lot of ground and changes character as you cross it. In the middle is the town itself, with pre-1919 brick terraces around the centre roofed in Welsh slate, a chimney stack on every party wall and an outrigger at the back. East of that, the Dearne Valley towns of Goldthorpe, Thurnscoe and Bolton upon Dearne are dense colliery streets built between about 1900 and 1930 to house the miners, and a great many are still on their original coverings.

Then there are the estates, and Barnsley has a lot of them. The borough built heavily between the wars and again after 1945, at Athersley, Kendray, New Lodge, Lundwood, Cudworth, Grimethorpe and around every former pit village, almost all of it concrete interlocking tile laid on bitumen felt. That stock is now sixty to seventy-five years old and it is the single biggest source of work here. The tiles often look acceptable from the pavement while the felt beneath has gone brittle and the nails have rusted, which is why a roof that has never leaked can start leaking in three places in one winter.

West of Dodworth the geology changes and so do the roofs. Penistone, Thurlstone, Millhouse Green, Silkstone, Cawthorne, Hoylandswaine, Oxspring and Thurgoland are built in local sandstone, and many still carry graduated Yorkshire stone slate laid in diminishing courses. The ground is higher and the weather harder up there, so stone slates slip when their pegs fail and ridges take a battering from the west. Add the conservation areas at Elsecar and in Penistone town centre, where materials are not a free choice, and the borough asks for a wider range of roofing than most places its size.