Roofers in Goole

The roofs of Goole

Goole did not exist as any kind of settlement until the Aire and Calder Navigation company built it from scratch. The Dutch River, cut by the engineer Cornelius Vermuyden between 1626 and 1629 to drain the marshland of Hatfield Chase, had already given coal barges from South Yorkshire a route to the sea, but it was the company's own docks, laid out from 1826 by engineer Thomas Hamond Bartholomew and contractor Sir Edward Banks, that created the town. The Banks Arms Hotel on Aire Street, now the Lowther Hotel, was the first building in what was then called "New Goole" in 1824, and the port opened on 20 July 1826 to a new community of about 450 people.

William Hamond Bartholomew's "Tom Pudding" system, introduced in 1863, ran compartment boats of around 40 long tons of coal down the canals to Goole, where hoists lifted and tipped each one straight into a waiting ship; the system stayed in competitive use against rail transport until 1985. The port itself is still described as the United Kingdom's furthest inland port, about 50 miles from the North Sea, with three locks holding 37 acres of floating dock at a constant depth unaffected by the tide outside. Modern employers on the same site include a Guardian Industries glass plant, a Tesco distribution centre and, since 2024, a Siemens Mobility factory building trains for London's Piccadilly line.

The planned town Bartholomew and Banks laid out is consistently Welsh slate rather than the pantile more usual on this coast: the Lowther Hotel, the Royal Hotel and 2 Adam Street, all built in the 1820s, and the 1888 Police Station and Magistrates' Court are every one of them brick under a slate roof, and St John's Church of 1843 to 1848 is stone under slate too. Only the farm buildings on the town's rural fringe, which predate the port, keep the pantile roofs typical of the older East Riding, a genuine split between the planned Victorian town and the countryside it was carved out of.