Roofers in Keighley

The roofs of Keighley

Keighley sits where the River Worth joins the Aire, with the Worth Valley moors rising directly behind it. The town went from 5,745 people in 1801 to a peak of 56,944 in 1951, so the bulk of what stands is Victorian and Edwardian mill housing in local sandstone, with inter-war and post-war layers added above and around it. The oldest survivals are the clothier halls of the wool trade, and East Riddlesden Hall, built in ashlar in 1642 for a Halifax clothier, is Grade I listed.

The roofs here have a longer stone tail than most of Yorkshire. Bradford Council's guidance records that local sandstone was used as a roofing material from the late sixteenth century until the railways arrived in the middle of the nineteenth and brought lighter, cheaper Welsh and Westmorland slate, and that in some areas stone slate carried on into the early twentieth century and became a feature of vernacular revival work. In practice that means a Keighley street can have genuine stone slate, Victorian Welsh slate and early twentieth-century stone slate side by side, and telling them apart decides how a repair is done. The conservation areas are unusually dense too, running from the town centre and Cliffe Castle out through Low Utley, Braithwaite, Hainworth, East Morton, Silsden, Steeton and Oakworth to Haworth, Stanbury and three separate areas at Oxenhope.

Water is the defining local problem. The rivers meet at about 88 metres and the ground climbs fast to 287 metres at Keighley Tarn, so run-off arrives quickly. Rainfall is around 1,067 millimetres a year, the town was badly hit in 2000, 2004 and 2015, and roughly 460 homes and 290 businesses remain at risk. On a Keighley roof it is rarely the covering that fails first. It is the valleys, the gutters and the rainwater goods, which are carrying far more water than the same details would inland, and the money spent on them is the best money spent on the house.