Roofers in Goldthorpe

The roofs of Goldthorpe

Goldthorpe has prehistoric roots, with Bronze Age cremation finds recorded nearby and a mention in the Domesday Book, but the village that stands today was built almost entirely by coal. Mining dominated the local economy through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and ended in the immediate area only in 1994, when Goldthorpe Colliery closed. The railway station tells its own story: closed under the Beeching cuts, it reopened in 1988 on the Wakefield Line, giving Goldthorpe a direct service to Leeds, Sheffield and Meadowhall that most Dearne Valley villages lost for good.

What sets Goldthorpe apart right now is the scale of what is being rebuilt. More than £23 million of government Towns Fund money is going into the village. The first phase, largely complete, saw the council buy and clear thirty properties on Co-operative Street and Victoria Street, with nine new-build, highly energy-efficient affordable homes for Berneslai Homes due to start in autumn 2025. A second phase, backed by the council's Cabinet in March, could see up to thirty-nine more properties around Co-operative Street and Claycliffe Terrace bought and demolished, funded by a further £5.3 million, with new green public realm planned to link Market Street, Co-operative Street and Victoria Street. Few villages this size are being rebuilt street by street quite this visibly.

Goldthorpe's other export was a boy from Probert Avenue. Brian Blessed grew up there and was educated at Dearneside School in the village; his father William was a miner at Hickleton Main Colliery, and Brian avoided going down the pit himself by acting in school productions instead, eventually training at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol. He went on to play Augustus in I, Claudius, King Richard IV in Blackadder and Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon, and received an OBE in 2016. None of that changes the roofing, which is the everyday mix of a Dearne Valley village: colliery terraces still on slate, post-war estates on concrete tile, and now a run of brand new roofs going up on the sites the council has cleared.