Roofers in Castleford

The roofs of Castleford

Castleford is the odd one out in West Yorkshire: a brick town, not a stone one. It grew from about a thousand people to fourteen thousand across the nineteenth century as the collieries opened, and it made its own brick rather than importing it. Two Castleford Brick Companies are on record, one from 1897 to 1912 and a later Glasshoughton works running as a branch of the Yorkshire Brick Company from 1922 to 1965, and individual collieries ran their own brickworks alongside. It was a glass town too, the largest producer of bottles and jars in Britain by the 1850s, until the last bottle maker closed in the early 1980s.

Wakefield Council's district design code puts Castleford in a coalfield area where the majority of buildings are red brick, typically the late nineteenth-century factory-made smooth dark red sort, with the housing built for the mining workforce in a mixture of stone and brick. The traditional roof coverings it names across the district are stone flags and Welsh or Westmorland slate. So the Castleford pattern is red brick walls under slate, which is a different job from the stone towns west of here: the pointing, the stacks and the way a repair is matched all change. Airedale, on the north-east side, is largely local authority housing, and the town had no conservation area at all until February 2026, when a community-led proposal researched by Castleford Civic Society was approved covering streets including Bank Street and Sagar Street.

Water is the other defining fact. The town is low and flat at roughly 43 metres and the Calder joins the Aire just north-west of it. On Boxing Day 2015 the Aire reached 5.21 metres at Armley, more than a metre above its previous record, with flood alerts across Castleford, Methley and Allerton Bywater. None of that is a roof problem directly, but it changes the priorities: on ground this low, gutters, outlets and downpipes that actually deliver water to a drain matter as much as the covering above them.