Roofers in Otley

The roofs of Otley

Otley grew rich on printing presses rather than wool or coal. William Dawson, David Payne and Robert Elliott developed the Wharfedale printing press from a back-street joiner's shop in the 1850s, and by 1911 more than 2,000 people were making the machines across seven separate sites in the town, exporting them worldwide. That workforce needed houses, and Otley Building Society put up the town's first row of terraces from 1847, followed by 111 more running down the slope from Leeds Road, built by various speculators over about seventeen years to 1914. The cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale was born here in 1718, long before any of it.

The Otley Conservation Area was first designated in 1970 and re-appraised in 2003, and Otley Town Council's own guide for residents spells out exactly what it expects: buildings of two to three storeys in coarse Chevin gritstone masonry, with stone or slate roofs, stone lintels and cills, and stone boundary walls. That is not a vague heritage gesture; it is a design brief the council applies to renovations as well as new building across the 101-hectare area. It matches what stands there already: of the town's 152 listed buildings, the large majority are stone with a stone slate roof, with Welsh and blue slate on some later properties, and the Silver Mill Complex surviving from Otley's earlier wool-milling years.

Water is what makes Otley's recent history distinctive. On Boxing Day 2015 the River Wharfe flooded more than 50 homes and several businesses and submerged the road to the town's seven-arched medieval Otley Bridge, cutting the community in two and severing access to schools, shops and the hospital. Leeds City Council's response was a £4.5m flood alleviation scheme, an embankment along Billams Hill finished in late 2021 that cut the town's annual flood risk from a 20 per cent chance to a 4 per cent chance. When a real flood arrived in February 2022, the new scheme held: the road stayed open and the water stayed out. Most river towns can only describe their flood risk. Otley can point to a defence that has already been tested.