Roofers in Dewsbury

The roofs of Dewsbury

Dewsbury was built on shoddy and mungo, the trade of pulling old woollen cloth apart and spinning it into heavy blankets and uniforms. It made the town prosperous, and because the trade only fell away after the 1973 oil crisis the mill-era terraces were never widely cleared. They are still here, and they are local sandstone off the Coal Measures rather than brick, because the stone was quarried alongside the coal. Kirklees still names stone as the traditional walling material across the district and local stone flags and UK slate as the traditional roof.

Northfields, north of the centre, is the best of it: a late Victorian suburb of stone villas and terraces on tree-lined streets, largely finished by about 1890 and protected since 1978, mostly two storeys with some three and a lot of traditional dormers. The town centre conservation area is a different story. It sits on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register in very bad condition, with buildings empty and in poor repair, which is why a Heritage Action Zone and a Townscape Heritage Initiative have both been aimed at it. Heritage roof and stonework repair is live local trade here in a way it is not in most towns, and the restoration of the Arcade's 1899 glazed roof was carried out by the same Dewsbury firm that made the original.

Around sixty per cent of homes across Kirklees post-date 1945, so the estates at Chickenley, Dewsbury Moor and Thornhill Lees are a large share of the work, mostly concrete tile on their first covering. More is coming: Dewsbury Riverside at Thornhill Lees is the largest allocation in the Kirklees Local Plan at roughly 4,000 homes. The ground matters too. The centre sits low between about 130 and 180 feet, rising to 360 feet at Earlsheaton and 755 feet at Grange Moor, so exposure changes street by street across a town that takes around a metre of rain a year.