Roofers in Normanton

The roofs of Normanton

Normanton sits on the River Calder between Wakefield and Castleford, first recorded as "Norman-tune" in the Domesday Book of 1086 with a church already in place. That church, All Saints', has stood on the site since at least 1256, when it passed to the Knights Hospitaller, and its 15th-century Perpendicular tower still carries the coursed dressed sandstone and stone slate roof that mark it out from almost everything built around it since. Nearby, the Manor of Newland on the Calder's north bank was founded in 1213 by King John as a Knights Templar preceptory, one of only two in the whole of the West Riding, before it too passed to the Hospitallers and was later dissolved under Henry VIII.

Everything built after that came from coal and clay. Collieries around Normanton employed over 10,000 men at their peak, with most seams worked out by the mid-1970s, and the terraces they filled were built from brick fired close to home: three separate brickworks operated in the small Newland area alone, and the Normanton Brick Company, founded by Thomas Kirk at Altofts in the 1890s, did not finally close until 2011. Wakefield's district design code places Normanton, like neighbouring Castleford, in a coalfield area of majority red brick, typically the late 19th-century factory-made smooth dark red sort, with stone flag roofs and Welsh or Westmorland slate named as the traditional covering district-wide. Normanton holds one of the district's 31 conservation areas, and the roofing work here is mostly slate and tile on brick, not the stone-on-stone repairs further west in Kirklees.

Normanton's real claim to fame, though, predates the coal industry's peak. When the North Midland Railway, the York and North Midland Railway and the Manchester and Leeds Railway met here from 1840, their shared junction briefly held the world's longest railway station platform, a quarter of a mile long, and the station handled around 700,000 passengers a year before the buildings were later demolished. A quieter footnote from the same era: in 1871 Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, visited the town and gave his name, slightly altered, to the Don Pedro Colliery at Hopetown, whose roads still carry the name today.