Roofers in Mirfield

The roofs of Mirfield

Mirfield sits on the A644 between Brighouse and Dewsbury, on the River Calder and the Calder and Hebble Navigation, the 18th-century canal that brought textile mills and boat building to the town and still carries pleasure boats through a marina at Shepley Bridge today. The town was made up of six historic hamlets, Towngate, Lee Green, Northorpe, Easthorpe, Far Side Moor and Hopton, and it ran its own affairs as an urban district from 1894 until 1974, when Kirklees absorbed it. Its oldest surviving buildings are hall houses in the older hamlets: Northorpe Hall, Hopton Hall and Water Hall are all recorded with stone slate roofs, and St Mary's Church was rebuilt in 1871 by Sir George Gilbert Scott on a much older foundation, also under a steeply pitched stone slate roof.

Kirklees's own district guidance names stone as the traditional walling material and local stone flags and UK slate as the traditional roof, and Mirfield's listed buildings bear that out directly rather than as a general rule borrowed from elsewhere. Upper Hopton, the hilltop hamlet built around the late Jacobean Hopton Hall and the churchyard of St John the Evangelist, is the town's conservation area, and its stone buildings are the specific thing the designation protects from unsympathetic change. That makes stone slate matching, and knowing which of the six hamlets a job sits in, more of the actual work here than it is in a town built in one Victorian phase.

Mirfield's clearest point of difference from every other Kirklees town on this site, though, has nothing to do with mills. In 1892 six priests founded the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican religious order, at Pusey House in Oxford; after a short spell at Radley it settled permanently at Mirfield in 1898 and has been based here ever since, still a working monastic community with 13 members as of January 2026. The foundation stone of its large Church of the Resurrection was laid in 1911 and the building finished in 1938, and its College of the Resurrection trained clergy on the same site, a young Rowan Williams among them before he became Archbishop of Canterbury. The town shares the Calder's flood exposure with its neighbours too, badly hit on Boxing Day 2015 and again in Storm Ciara in February 2020, so gutters, valleys and rainwater goods matter as much here as the covering above them.