Roofers in Bingley

The roofs of Bingley

Bingley grew on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, which reached the town in 1774 and brought a wave of woollen and worsted mill building, its workforce swelled by rural migrants and by Irish families fleeing the famine. The Damart mill is still working; most of the others have closed, several converted into flats. Bingley Grammar School was founded in the 16th century, one of the older schools in England, and Myrtle Grove, a Georgian house under a hipped green Westmorland slate roof, became the town's council headquarters and town hall from 1926.

Stone slate is overwhelmingly the roof this town was built under. Bingley's listed buildings, mostly gritstone farmhouses and cottages from the 17th and 18th centuries, are catalogued almost entirely as stone with a stone slate roof, and Bradford Council's own guidance on the material describes it as giving conservation areas a distinctive, unified roofscape that, properly maintained, should last well over a century and cannot really be replaced with anything else. The Bingley Conservation Area was appraised in October 2006, and the same rule applies to the mills and the canal's own listed structures as to the farmhouses.

Bingley's real superlative, though, is underfoot rather than overhead. The Five Rise Locks, a Grade I listed staircase on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal opened on 21 March 1774, remain the steepest flight of locks in Britain, climbing 59 feet 2 inches over just 320 feet at a gradient of about 1 in 5, with the tallest lock gates in the country. The Aire Valley around the town gave its name to a dog breed too: the Airedale Terrier was developed here and was simply known as the Bingley Terrier before being renamed in 1879. None of that stopped the River Aire flooding badly on Boxing Day 2015, when Ireland Bridge closed under water deep enough to reach a Land Rover's windscreen.