Roofers in Knottingley

The roofs of Knottingley

Knottingley grew on the River Aire and the Great North Road, recorded as "Cnotinesleahemm" as early as 1128, with a bridge across the river from 1198. It built ships into the late 17th century and kept boat building going well into the 20th, alongside a pottery trade, the Australian Pottery among the firms, that ran from the 19th century until as late as the 1940s. Glassmaking took over as the defining trade after 1870, and Bagley's Glassworks bought the rights to the first bottle-making machine, invented by a Ferrybridge postmaster, in 1887. St Botolph's Church anchors the historic core: a Norman foundation built for Robert de Lacy and the Monks of Pontefract in 1119 to 1121, largely rebuilt between 1750 and 1756, given a west tower in 1873 and remodelled again in 1886 and 1888, in magnesian limestone under a slate-tiled roof.

Knottingley sits on the eastern edge of the Wakefield district, on the magnesian limestone ridge that Wakefield's own design code treats as a distinct area from both the Pennine stone towns and the coalfield brick towns: creamy-yellow limestone walls and clay pantile roofs are the tradition named here, and the town's historic core of limestone buildings and boundary walls around St Botolph's is the surviving example the council points to. It is one of 31 conservation areas across the district. Roofing work in Knottingley therefore means limestone and pantile repairs on the older core as much as slate work on Victorian terraces, a different mix from the stone-slate towns further into West Yorkshire.

What sets Knottingley apart from every other town in this batch, though, happened on its doorstep rather than in its streets. Kellingley Colliery, immediately next to the town, closed on 18 December 2015 as the last working deep coal mine anywhere in Britain, ending an industry that had shaped the whole region for two centuries; 450 miners lost their jobs, and thousands marched through Knottingley the following day to mark it. The town's other great landmark, the cooling towers of Ferrybridge Power Station, visible for miles, came down between 2019 and 2022, closing out the same industrial era from the other direction.