Roofers in Catterick Garrison

The roofs of Catterick Garrison

Catterick Garrison is, by its own description, the largest British Army garrison in the world, covering more than 2,400 acres three miles south of Richmond. Robert Baden-Powell chose the site in 1914 after Richmond Castle proved too small for the Northumbrian Division's headquarters, and building began that August as the First World War broke out. What started as "Richmond Camp", renamed "Catterick Camp" the following year, was built for around 40,000 men in 2,000 temporary huts and served as a prisoner-of-war camp after both world wars.

The camp only became permanent after the partition of Ireland in 1921 left the Army needing a UK replacement for The Curragh; the building contractor John Laing & Son carried out the construction programme from 1923, with most of the brick barrack blocks complete by the mid-1930s. Those barracks are still named after First World War battles rather than local geography, Alma Lines, Cambrai Lines, Bourlon Barracks, Somme Barracks and Vimy Barracks among them, and the settlement only took its current name, Catterick Garrison, in 1973. The town is split between two civil parishes, Scotton to the south and Hipswell to the north, and its Foxglove Covert nature reserve, opened in 1992, was the first of its kind in North Yorkshire and the first on Ministry of Defence land anywhere in the UK.

Roofing here follows the Army's own building programmes rather than a market town's conservation area. The permanent brick barrack blocks and married quarters put up under the 1920s and 1930s John Laing programme carry the plain, functional roofing typical of the period, and later Ministry of Defence housing estates have added their own roofs since. The most recent change came with Princes Gate, built on former MoD land between 2013 and 2015 with shops, a cinema, a hotel and restaurants, alongside a supermarket and retail parade on Richmond Road that opened in 2000; that newer retail and housing stock is now as much a part of the roofing work here as the older barrack blocks themselves.