Roofers in Brighouse

The roofs of Brighouse

Brighouse grew up on the River Calder, which powered its flour mills and textile mills long before it had a name on a map that mattered. The Calder and Hebble Navigation, begun in 1757 by the engineer John Smeaton, gave that industry a further boost, and the town was formally incorporated only in 1893, with its Town Hall going up in 1898 to mark the occasion. A wooden Rastrick Bridge over the Calder was already recorded in 1275, so this crossing point has been settled far longer than the Victorian town suggests. Many of the mills that made Brighouse's money have since been converted into loft-style apartments rather than knocked down.

Of the 71 listed buildings catalogued for the town, the overwhelming majority are stone under a stone slate roof: farmhouses and cottages from the 17th and 18th centuries, terraced cottage rows such as Brighouse Wood Row and William Henry Street, and mill buildings including the late 18th-century Kirklees Mill and Perseverance Mill of 1831. That is the same Elland Flags tradition worked at Southowram, Northowram, Rastrick and Brighouse itself since at least 1314, and reclaimed stone slate and Welsh slate are still stocked at neighbouring Elland today. What is unusual is that none of it sits inside a conservation area. Calderdale's own list of the district's designated areas runs to 28, from Halifax and Elland to Sowerby Bridge, Hebden Bridge and Northowram Village, and Brighouse and Rastrick are not on it, so like-for-like repair here is a choice a homeowner makes rather than a planning condition, except on the listed buildings themselves.

Two things set Brighouse apart from the stone towns further up the valley. The first is water: the Calder and Clifton Beck both flooded on Boxing Day 2015, in what Calderdale Council calls the most extensive flooding Brighouse has known, putting nearly 70 homes and over 100 commercial buildings at risk around the Armytage industrial estate, Rastrick Bridge, Brighouse Bridge and River Street, and a flood alleviation scheme is now being developed because the existing defences date to the 1960s. The second is stranger: Kirklees Park at Clifton, on the town's edge, holds the gatehouse of a demolished Cistercian priory where medieval legend says Robin Hood died, and a folly in the woods known ever since as Robin Hood's Grave.