Roofers in Ossett

The roofs of Ossett

Ossett sits on the western, Pennine-facing edge of the Wakefield district, between Wakefield and Dewsbury, and its building stock reflects that in-between position directly. Wakefield's own district design code places Ossett and neighbouring Horbury in a distinct western area, describing slim coursed sandstone walling often finished with red-brick gables, under stone flag roofs or Welsh and Westmorland slate. That is a different pattern from both the red brick coalfield towns to the east and the clay pantile limestone belt further out, and it is exactly what shows up on the ground: Trinity Church, built 1862 to 1865 in coursed squared stone with ashlar dressings and a 226-foot spire, carries Welsh slate roofs, while Ossett Town Hall, opened in 1908 on the site of the old grammar school, is dressed stone in a Renaissance style.

Coal was worked here from the 13th and 14th centuries, long before the Victorian boom, with recorded day holes and a 1339 order for townsfolk to backfill worked-out pits; the last major closure, Shaw Cross, did not come until 1968. The bigger industry, though, was shoddy, the recycling of old woollen rags into new cloth, which took off around 1813 and grew Ossett into a mill town of over forty separate mills at its peak. Four textile mills still operate today, among them Ings Mill and the carpet-tile maker Burmatex, and two of Wakefield's 31 conservation areas protect the stone and brick streets that trade built. Uniquely for a town this size, it never got a railway station of its own: Ossett is the largest town in Yorkshire, and one of the largest in Britain, without one.

Ossett's best-known export in living memory has nothing to do with wool or coal. The video game studio Team17, creator of the Worms series, was based in the town, and Worms itself contains a Hell level with a sign reading "Welcome to Ossett", a joke that has introduced the town's name to players who have never set foot in Yorkshire. Ossett also gets a namecheck in The KLF's 1990 song "It's Grim Up North", alongside every other Yorkshire mill town on this list.