Roofers in Holmfirth

The roofs of Holmfirth

Holmfirth grew fast from the 16th century as the cloth trade expanded and the quarries around it turned out ever more stone and slate. The parish church was rebuilt in 1778 after its 1476 predecessor was swept away by a flood the year before, the first of the town's two serious brushes with the River Holme. When Kirklees designated the Holmfirth Conservation Area in 1972, later extended in 1990, it described the place plainly as a pennine mill town little changed since late Georgian and early Victorian times, set in a dramatic valley with steep sloping sides, and named the roofscape of stone slates and chimneys as the feature that defines it.

That roofscape covers around half a square kilometre and roughly 550 buildings, 38 of them Grade II listed, yet Holmfirth has never had the money for a full formal appraisal of its own conservation area, and in 2009 Historic England placed it on the Heritage at Risk register as "At Risk" and in decline. A typical building on the town's own conservation survey is hammer-dressed stone with quoins, timber windows in stone surrounds, and, as everywhere else here, a stone slate roof. Repairing that roofscape properly, rather than letting it decline further, is most of what a Holmfirth roofing job actually is.

Two very different things put Holmfirth on the map. From 1973 to 2010 the BBC filmed Last of the Summer Wine here and across the Holme Valley, and its 37-year, 295-episode run holds the Guinness World Record for the longest-running television comedy series ever made anywhere. Long before the cameras arrived, at about one in the morning on 5 February 1852, the Bilberry Reservoir upstream collapsed and sent roughly 86 million gallons down the valley, killing 81 people and destroying mills, cottages, shops and seven bridges in one night, one of the deadliest dam failures in British history.