Roofers in Harrogate

The roofs of Harrogate

Harrogate grew from a spa into a Victorian town of gritstone villas and terraces, and its roofs are overwhelmingly Welsh slate. The early nineteenth-century houses around West Park and the Stray are terraced in the Georgian manner; from the mid 1800s the town built detached and semi-detached villas with canted bays between the centre and the Stray, long terraces on Kings Road, Strawberry Dale and Cheltenham Mount, and artisans' terraces such as Mayfield Grove. The Duchy estate, begun in the 1880s around Lancaster Road and Queens Road, holds the largest stone houses of the late Victorian and Edwardian years.

The conservation area appraisal says it plainly: the core is carboniferous sandstone with Welsh slate roofs, some older buildings have stone or Westmorland slate, and by the Edwardian period brick, render and Rosemary clay tiles began to rival stone and slate. The Harrogate Conservation Area, designated in 1973, takes in the Duchy, Low and High Harrogate, Montpellier and the Stray frontages, with more than three hundred listed buildings inside it. Natural slate and matching stone details are expected on repairs. Knaresborough next door is mostly Magnesian limestone, and the Dales beyond have their own stone slate.

Wheatlands, Oatlands and the north-west Duchy are high-quality inter-war housing, and post-war estates ring the town at Bilton, Jennyfields and Starbeck. The town sits between one and two hundred metres up in the rain shadow of the Pennines, so it is drier than the west but colder and snowier than the Vale of York below it, and the big villa roofs, with their valleys, dormers, bays and long lead gutters, are where the weather finds the weak points.