Roofers in Elland

The roofs of Elland

Elland turns up in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Elant", and St Mary the Virgin's church, standing since around 1180, is the oldest fixed point in a town that later filled in around it with Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian building. Southgate held a row of three shops from about 1840, Delf Hill and New Hey Road kept their terraced cottages, and the five-storey Exchange Mill and a run of chapels, Providence from 1822 to 1823, Bethesda Methodist from 1879 to 1880 and All Saints from 1900 to 1903, mark out the industrial and religious growth in between.

Almost all of that older stock was built in stone under a stone slate roof, and it is a tradition Elland lends its own name to: the Elland Flags, the Millstone Grit sandstone worked at Southowram, Northowram, Rastrick and Brighouse and split into roofing slates since at least 1314, are named for this town even where the stone itself came from just outside it. The conservation area protects the medieval street pattern around the Cross, the Rose & Crown Inn and St Mary's, with a separate southern stretch of the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian buildings that followed.

Elland's best-known export travelled a long way from any of that. Joseph Kagan invented the waterproof Gannex fabric at his mill here in 1951, and once his friend Harold Wilson wore a Gannex mac on a world tour in 1956 the coats became famous, later worn by Lyndon Johnson, Mao Zedong, Nikita Khrushchev, Queen Elizabeth II and, reportedly, the royal corgis. The town's other test came from the Calder rather than the wardrobe: on Boxing Day 2015 the river hit its highest recorded flow at the Elland gauge, a record dating to 1961, and Elland Bridge itself began to collapse in the early hours, cutting the town in two until it fully reopened in February 2017.