Roofers across East Yorkshire and Hull

The roofs of East Yorkshire and Hull

East Yorkshire is a low, flat, brick-and-pantile region. Clay pantiles were first imported to the East Riding from the Netherlands in the early 1600s and they are still the prevalent roof in Hull's Old Town, in Beverley and in Bridlington's Old Town, with Welsh slate arriving on the Victorian terraces and villas and concrete interlocking tiles on almost everything re-roofed since the 1950s. The Avenues in Hull add plain clay Rosemary tiles and tall corbelled chimneys to the mix.

Hull's pre-war housing was dense terraces off Hessle Road and Holderness Road built for the docks and the fishing fleet. Bombing destroyed more than five thousand homes and the council then built around 35,000 more, creating Bransholme and Orchard Park with their prefabricated and No Fines concrete terraces, tower blocks and a great many flat roofs. The East Riding towns added their own inter-war and post-war estates, West Hill at Bridlington and Grovehill and Swinemoor at Beverley among them.

Water is the theme. Around ninety per cent of Hull lies below the high-tide line, the 2007 downpour flooded thousands of homes across Hull and the East Riding, and the 2013 surge came over the Humber banks. On the coast the Holderness cliffs erode faster than anywhere in Europe and easterly gales drive salt spray well inland at Bridlington, Hornsea and Withernsea. Gutters, outlets and fixings matter here as much as the covering.

Inland is a third East Yorkshire again. The Wolds market towns, Driffield, Market Weighton and Howden among them, and the old ports and boroughs of Holderness such as Hedon, are Georgian and Victorian at heart, brick under pantile on the ordinary streets and slate on the grander buildings, several of them with a history running back centuries before Hull grew into a city at all.

Hull and the East Riding have not always run as two separate councils. Between 1974 and 1996 both sat inside the county of Humberside, a boundary that lumped Yorkshire towns north of the estuary in with Lincolnshire ones south of it and was never popular locally; a 1990s local government review abolished it, and since 1 April 1996 Hull City Council and East Riding of Yorkshire Council have run as two entirely separate unitary authorities either side of the same river. East Riding of Yorkshire is one of the largest local government districts in England by area, and its population is spread thinly across it: alongside Brough and Elloughton in the shadow of the old Blackburn and later BAE Systems aircraft works at Brough Aerodrome, and the chalk headland at Flamborough, the one stretch of this low county that is not flat at all, its roofing character genuinely runs from working aerodrome town to seaside resort to Wolds village within a few miles.