Roofers in Doncaster

The roofs of Doncaster

Doncaster is a railway and coal town on flat land beside the Don. The Plant Works opened in 1853 and the terraced streets built for its workers still stand in Hexthorpe and Balby under Welsh slate, with the works site itself now the Pullman Green estate. The collieries that followed built their own model villages: Woodlands, laid out for Brodsworth Colliery with Arts and Crafts gables, roughcast render and red brick chimney stacks and protected as a conservation area since 1979; New Rossington after the pit was sunk in 1912; Edlington for Yorkshire Main. Town Field and the Jarratt Estate at Bessacarr are the planned early twentieth-century suburbs of the better-off.

The outer ring is inter-war and 1950s: Wheatley Hills grew from the Hills Lane Estate of the 1930s to its present size with the Ennerdale and Greenleafe estates, Intake and Bessacarr filled in around it, and at Bristol Grove the 1950s Howard steel-framed semis were built with bathroom pods craned into place. Post-war council flats added flat roofs across the borough, and St Leger Homes, which manages the council's stock, has been replacing them on hundreds of properties, with more roof replacement planned for 2026 and 2027.

The ground is the local factor. The Don floodplain north and east of the town floods regularly, notably in 2007 and in November 2019 when the river reached a record height at Doncaster and Fishlake was cut off. East of the town on the Humberhead Levels the older farmsteads are brick and pantile. For a roofer that means gutters, outlets and drainage matter as much as the covering, and flat roofs on extensions and blocks are a bigger share of the work than in the hill towns.