Roofers in Hornsea

The roofs of Hornsea

Hornsea's oldest streets, Market Place, Newbegin, Eastgate, Southgate and Westgate, are built from a genuinely local mix of cobble and brick under pantile. St Nicholas' Church, the oldest building in the town, is built in cobbles with freestone dressings, and houses from the late sixteenth century onward, among them Burns Farm, now Hornsea Museum, and the White House of 1674, are cobble and brick on cobble foundations under a pantile roof, some with the raised, tumbled gables typical of the East Riding. The fields around the town were enclosed in 1809, New Road was cut through to the coast in 1848, and Victorian expansion followed in the 1860s and 1870s with Grosvenor Terrace and Brampton House among the new streets. Hornsea Pottery, founded in the town in 1949 and closed in 2000, together with an earlier brickworks and a hydraulic engineering works, were the employers that grew the town through the twentieth century.

Grander Victorian buildings switch from pantile to slate: the former Pike and Heron public house of about 1830, the 1831 vicarage, the 1864 railway station and the 1868 United Reformed Church are all brick under slate rather than pantile. The area of old Hornsea around the Market Place, Hall Garth Park, the large houses by the former railway station and Grosvenor Road became a conservation area in 2007. A genuine Hornsea repair starts by checking which century, and which material, is actually on the roof.

Two things set Hornsea apart from every other town on this coast. Hornsea Mere, immediately west of the old town, is the largest freshwater lake in Yorkshire, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Protection Area for its birds, and Hornsea's own seafront is the eastern end point of the 207-mile Trans Pennine Trail from Southport. None of that slows the sea down: the Holderness coast either side of the town is recorded as the fastest-eroding in Europe, losing around 1.5 metres a year on average and at least 23 towns and villages since Roman times, with Hornsea's own shoreline retreating by up to 2 metres a year on its south side. Gutters, flashings and fixings built for that kind of weather matter here as much as the covering itself.