Roofers in Dinnington

The roofs of Dinnington

Dinnington was a farming hamlet of around 250 people in 1901. The Dinnington Main Colliery Company, formed the previous year by the Sheffield Coal Company and the Sheepbridge Coal and Iron Co, began sinking a shaft in 1902 and drew first coal in 1905, and by 1911 the population had grown to nearly 5,000. Miners were housed first in a prefabricated settlement at Laughton Common known locally as "Tin Town", then in permanent brick terraces built around Laughton Road, the streets that still make up most of the town today.

What makes Dinnington different from the other Rotherham pit towns on this site is where the line falls. The Dinnington Conservation Area, designated in 1976, protects a much older village around St Leonard's Church and Dinnington Hall, and a local geology and architecture study is unusually specific about the boundary: it says the area begins at Barleycroft Lane, where "the character of the town changes completely", from the colliery-built brick streets to older buildings in yellowish Magnesian limestone roofed traditionally in red pantile. St Leonard's itself stands on a site used by a church built shortly before 1088, burned down around 1318, and rebuilt in 1868 for the landowner Robert Athorpe; Dinnington Hall and its listed stable block sit within the same small conservation area.

The colliery closed in 1992 with the loss of 1,000 jobs, and the town's Wikipedia entry records, sourced to the ONS national statistics hub, that Dinnington "still boasted the highest level of unemployment in the UK" as late as 2001, a full decade after closure. Dinnington was formally declared a town in 2003 specifically to attract investment and turn that around. It is a more specific, more sourced version of the pit-closure story than a general "the mine shut and the town struggled" line, and it shapes what a re-roof here actually looks like: colliery terraces well past their first covering everywhere outside that one conservation-area boundary.