Roofers in Northallerton

The roofs of Northallerton

Northallerton grew up on through-traffic. It sat on the main road between London and Scotland for centuries, and by the eighteenth century the High Street held four separate coaching inns serving the mail and stage coaches that passed through daily, a trade that collapsed almost overnight once the railway reached the town in 1841. What came after was a new role: County Hall and North Yorkshire's police headquarters are both based here today, and the town's population more than doubled between 1961 and 1991 as it grew into the county's administrative centre. Two miles north at Cowton Moor, an English army broke a Scottish invasion at the Battle of the Standard on 22 August 1138, with losses reported at up to 12,000 men, one of the larger battles fought on English soil in the medieval period.

The roofs of the coaching-era town are recorded in detail. All Saints' Church, Grade I listed and twelfth century, carries roofs of Westmorland slate and lead, and Durham House, an elegant mid-eighteenth-century townhouse designed by the architect John Carr, has a hipped Westmorland slate roof of its own. Across Northallerton's 66 listed buildings, pantile is the most common covering on the seventeenth to nineteenth century stock, with Welsh slate frequent and stone slate on some of the older eighteenth-century buildings, so a genuine mix sits behind the High Street's Georgian frontages rather than one uniform material.

Weather here is a matter of record rather than impression. The Met Office station a few miles away at Leeming logged 38.8 degrees Celsius in July 2022, the northernmost point in the whole of the UK ever to pass 38 degrees, and Northallerton's own becks, Brompton Beck and Turker Beck among them, have a history of flash flooding after heavy summer storms. Roofs here take genuine extremes in both directions: hard summer heat on flat felt and membrane roofs one year, saturated ground and overwhelmed gutters the next.