Roofers in Malton

The roofs of Malton

Malton stands on the site of a Roman auxiliary fort, Derventio Brigantum, founded around 71 AD under the governor Petilius Cerialis, with a civilian settlement recorded across the river at what is now Norton; Roman occupation here lasted until around 429 AD, giving Malton the oldest documented settlement of any town on this site. A Gilbertine monastery followed between 1147 and 1154, and Malton Castle, rebuilt in stone by Eustace Fitz John after starting as a Norman timber structure, hosted Richard I in 1189, Edward II in 1307 and Robert the Bruce in 1322 before being slighted in 1212. The market, first documented in 1283, still runs today, and gas lighting reached the streets in 1832, followed by two railway lines, York to Scarborough in 1845 and Malton to Driffield in 1853.

The roofs around that market are a genuine mix. St Michael's Church is recorded with a slate roof, and named buildings around Market Place and Castlegate, the Green Man, the Clarence public house, 28 and 44 Market Place and 76 and 82 to 82A Castlegate among them, are recorded with pantile roofs, with Welsh slate appearing on a smaller number of buildings including the Green Man's own roof and Malton Museum. Pantile is the majority covering across the town centre, so a repair here is far more often a pantile job than a slate one, the opposite balance from many Yorkshire towns.

Malton has reinvented itself more recently than most. The We Love Malton campaign, launched in 2009, rebuilt the town's identity around food and drink, and it is now routinely described as the food capital of Yorkshire and was named among the best places to live in Britain by the Sunday Times in both 2017 and 2018. None of that has changed the town's relationship with the River Derwent, though: flooding has been recorded in nine separate years since 1999, most recently in 2021, and Norton-on-Derwent sits directly across the water, close enough that the two are really one town split by a river and a county boundary.