Roofers in Huddersfield

The roofs of Huddersfield

Huddersfield is built almost entirely of local sandstone, much of it from the Rough Rock quarries at Crosland Hill, and Kirklees still names stone flags and UK slate as the traditional roofing of the district. The oldest roofs, on the weavers' cottages of Golcar and the farms up the Colne and Holme valleys, are Yorkshire stone flags. The Victorian terraces and the villas of Edgerton, laid out from the 1850s, carry Welsh slate. Around sixty per cent of Kirklees homes were built after 1945, so the inter-war and post-war estates at Brackenhall, Deighton, Sheepridge and Newsome are the largest single share of the work.

It is the wettest of the West Yorkshire towns, with over a thousand millimetres of rain a year and December the wettest month. Above the town the M62 crosses the moors at Windy Hill, where snow lies for around 35 days a year and the footbridge is designed for 120 mile an hour winds. A roof in Marsden or Slaithwaite lives in that weather, and lead, ridges, verges and gutters have to be specified for it.

The council is part way through a five-year programme to bring every one of its homes up to standard, with roofing among the planned works, and the Berry Brow towers are coming down to be replaced with houses. For the owner-occupier on a 1930s semi in Almondbury or a stone terrace in Lindley, the same story applies: the original covering has done its time and the felt, battens and fixings underneath it are what fail first.