Roofers in Hebden Bridge

The roofs of Hebden Bridge

Hebden Bridge grew on wool, its trade served by the Rochdale Canal running to Manchester and by the Manchester and Leeds Railway, and the sheer volume of clothing made here once earned the town the nickname "Trouser Town". What makes it different from every other mill town in this batch is what its builders did with almost no flat land to build on: the steep valley sides produced the "over and under" terrace, four to five storeys stacked so that the upper storeys face uphill and the lower storeys face downhill into the same hillside, and what looks like a single building is legally two separate houses with a "flying freehold" over the shared floor. Hebden Bridge Town Hall, Grade II listed and dating from 1898, and the 500-seat Hebden Bridge Picture House from the same era, anchor the town centre that grew up around that housing.

The stone itself is the same material as the rest of the Calder Valley. Hebden Bridge sits in the Elland Flags sandstone belt, quarried and split into roofing slates since at least 1314 and worked at scale at Southowram, Northowram, Rastrick and Brighouse into the late 19th century, and that stone slate is what covers the valley-side terraces and over-and-under houses alike. The Hebden Bridge Conservation Area was designated in 1973, with Heptonstall's own conservation area just up the hill dating from 1971, both protecting the upper valley's stone townscape.

Water is the defining risk on a valley floor this tight. On Boxing Day 2015, during Storm Eva, the Calder reached 3.63 metres at Hebden Bridge, its highest level ever recorded, part of a Calderdale-wide flood that damaged more than 3,000 homes and around 1,500 businesses in a single day, and the town had already flooded badly once before, in the summer of 2012. On an over-and-under terrace that means the roof, the valleys and the guttering above are doing double duty: keeping two separate households dry from a single stacked structure, on a street where the ground floor itself is not always safe from the river. Hebden Bridge's other reputation, as the fourth quirkiest place in the world according to High Life magazine in 2005 and as the UK's so-called "lesbian capital", has nothing to do with roofing, but it is the reason most visitors have heard of the town at all.