Roofers in Filey

The roofs of Filey

Filey is really two towns fused together. Below the cliff, the Old Town around Church Street and Queen Street is a genuine fishing settlement, its cottages built for the crews of the cobles that still work the bay much as boats have along the whole Yorkshire and north-east coast. Above it, the resort town began in 1835 when a Birmingham solicitor called John Wilkes Unett bought seven acres of land and built the Crescent, later the Royal Crescent, which opened to visitors in the 1850s. Filey's own railway station, built in 1846 in red brick with sandstone dressings and a slate roof, is Grade II* listed, evidence of how fast the seaside trade grew once the line arrived.

The twentieth century added a third layer. Butlin's began building a holiday camp on the clifftop in 1939, and by the late 1950s it could hold ten thousand holidaymakers a week before it finally closed in 1984. Part of that site has since become The Bay Filey, a roughly six-hundred-home coastal housing development that started completing homes in 2007 and is recorded as one of the largest schemes of its kind in the UK. So a Filey roofing job might be a pantiled Old Town cottage from the eighteenth century, a Victorian Crescent townhouse, or a house built within the last two decades on former holiday-camp land, three completely different structures within a few hundred yards of each other.

The Old Town's listed buildings show pantile as the dominant historic covering: 43 and 45 Church Street is whitewashed stone with a pantile roof, 13 Church Street is sandstone with a pantile roof and a coped gable, and 82 Queen Street is rendered with a dentilled eaves course and a pantile roof. Later and grander buildings on the same streets shift to slate, as at Church Cliff Farmhouse. Filey Brigg, the mile-long rocky headland that shelters the bay, also defines the town's weather: this is an exposed stretch of North Sea coast, and flash flooding hit the town badly as recently as July 2007, so gutters and flashings here are working against salt, wind and sudden downpours rather than one gentle prevailing direction.