Roofers in Mexborough

The roofs of Mexborough

Mexborough sits where the River Don meets the River Dearne, mentioned in the Domesday Book as "Mechesburg", with a market reportedly held here for 800 years. What stands today around Bank Street is almost entirely a Victorian and Edwardian creation: the settlement expanded rapidly as a colliery town from the mid-1800s, and the market itself moved onto and around Bank Street from 1870 onwards. That is the area now protected as the Mexborough Conservation Area, designated on 8 June 2004, one of the more recently designated conservation areas we cover.

Doncaster Council's own appraisal is unusually direct about what makes Bank Street special and what is putting it at risk. "Sandstone was the traditional material but there is also some red brick," it says. "The principle roof materials are slate." It then names the ongoing replacement of that original slate with concrete tiles and pantiles as a negative feature actively harming the conservation area's character, on buildings such as the Montagu Arms and several Bank Street shop parades. The result, in the council's own words, is that "at the time of writing, this conservation area is considered to be a 'Conservation Area at Risk' in the list compiled by English Heritage." There is not one listed building inside the conservation area boundary itself: the closest is the Grade I 12th-century Church of St John the Baptist, half a mile to the east.

A bypass built through the town in the late 1960s and early 1970s cut Bank Street off, physically and visually, from that older historic core around the church, the station, the canal and the riverside, a separation that still shapes how the town reads today. Sitting close to where the Don meets the Dearne, Mexborough is also within reach of the Don valley's documented flood history, including the June 2007 floods that hit Sheffield, Rotherham and the towns downstream.