Roofers in Batley

The roofs of Batley

Batley and the Spen Valley were the heart of the Victorian shoddy and mungo trade, recycling old woollen cloth into new fabric, and the money it made is still standing. It built multi-storey stone mills, a set of grand civic buildings and long runs of Victorian stone terraces. Batley Market Place is the civic heart of it, and the conservation area there holds seven listed buildings including the Public Library, the Church of All Saints on Stocks Lane and the Public Baths on Cambridge Street. Upper Batley is where the millowners built their own family homes, and it keeps a fine run of stone villas as a conservation area in its own right.

That leaves Batley with an unusual problem for a town this size: four conservation areas within a very short radius, Market Place, Upper Batley, Station Road and Cross Bank, with Birstall adjoining. Conservation-area consent comes up here far more often than it does in a comparable town, and the Market Place boundary has been extended to take in the buildings around All Saints and on Wellington Street. Kirklees names stone as the traditional walling material across the district and local stone flags and UK slate as the traditional roof, and on the protected streets that is exactly what a roofer meets.

The rest of the town is younger. Around sixty per cent of homes across Kirklees post-date 1945, so the mid-century estate housing at Carlinghow, Healey and Soothill sits alongside the Victorian stock and is now reaching the age where the first covering gives out. Building continues, with 319 homes going in at Soothill. Batley is also a hillside town, the centre at roughly 111 metres with ground rising to between 200 and 300 metres around it, so gable ends and ridges take more wind than the coalfield towns to the east.