Roofers in Halifax

The roofs of Halifax

Halifax has the oldest housing profile in West Yorkshire. Calderdale's own figures show well over half its homes built before 1945 and nearly two fifths before 1919, with terraces the dominant type and very few detached houses. The town centre sits at around 200 metres and its stone terraces climb the steep valley sides in a way that makes scaffolding a job in itself. Many are back-to-backs with underdwellings, the Halifax speciality where one house sits above another on a slope.

The town also sits on the classic Yorkshire roofing stone. The Elland Flags, found east of Halifax around Rastrick, Brighouse, Southowram and Northowram, are closely bedded grey-green sandstones that split into roofing slates; a roofing use is recorded as early as 1314 and around forty quarries were working them in 1900. Stone slate roofs survive widely alongside the Welsh slate that came by rail, and the listed Victorian model villages, Akroydon by George Gilbert Scott and the Crossleys' West Hill Park, are protected as conservation areas.

After the war the fields around Ovenden's Victorian streets were filled with council housing and prefabs, tower blocks went up at Mixenden in the 1970s, and at Beech Hill the 1970s flat-roofed houses are now being given new insulated pitched roofs by the council and Together Housing, which tells you how that generation of flat roofs has fared. Exposure is high everywhere: the moors above the town are among the snowiest places in England.