Roofers in Cudworth

The roofs of Cudworth

Cudworth was farmland until the pits arrived. Its population sat under a thousand for most of the nineteenth century, then jumped 58 per cent in the 1870s as Monk Bretton, Carlton Main and Monckton collieries opened around it, and 219 per cent in the 1890s when Grimethorpe Colliery cut its first sod on 8 October 1894, growing from 1,067 people in 1891 to 3,408 by 1901 and 9,377 by 1931. New streets went up on Sidcop in Upper Cudworth in 1876 for the miners, and a New Town estate followed in 1922, built mainly for railway workers on the line that ran a station here from 1840 to 1968. Cudworth has never been given a conservation area of its own, so what stands is working housing stock rather than protected streets: colliery terraces, inter-war semis and post-war estate housing side by side.

What makes Cudworth unusual is not the mining, which it shares with a dozen towns on this site, but who came out of it. Sir Michael Parkinson was born here on 28 March 1935, the son of a miner who once took him down Grimethorpe Colliery specifically to put him off following him underground; he went on to host the television talk show Parkinson for over three decades. Six years later, on 9 May 1941, Dorothy Hyman was born in the same village, and went on to win silver in the 100 metres and bronze in the 200 metres at the 1960 Rome Olympics, a European 100 metres title and Commonwealth sprint double in 1962, and a relay bronze at the 1964 Tokyo Games; she is on record as the last British woman to take an individual Olympic sprint medal at 100m or 200m. Cudworth's athletics stadium and its 400 metre track, opened in 1973 and refurbished in 2009, still carry her name.

The village is also mid-regeneration. It is one of six Principal Towns in Barnsley's masterplan programme, with fifty-five shopfronts already supported and St John's Gardens created on land that stood disused, and the next phase will clear a derelict row on Barnsley Road for a new urban park and clock tower. For a roofer that means a working mix of old and new: nail-sick slate on the Victorian terraces, worn concrete tile on the 1920s and post-war estates, and the fascias, gutters and flashings that come with any village updating its centre street by street.