Roofers in Pocklington

The roofs of Pocklington

Pocklington's name comes from the Old English "Poclintun", "Pocel's people", but people were here roughly a thousand years before that name was recorded: Bronze Age habitation, then an Iron Age town of the Parisi tribe, and by the Domesday Book of 1086 the second largest settlement in Yorkshire after York itself. A 2017 excavation ahead of a housing development on the edge of the town found the clearest evidence yet of just how significant that Iron Age town was: a warrior's grave of around 320 to 174 BC, containing a bronze shield, the remains of a chariot and the skeletons of buried ponies. The archaeologist leading the dig, Paula Ware, said the shield's scalloped border "is not comparable to any other Iron Age finds across Europe", and that burying horses with the dead was itself exceptionally rare for the period.

Medieval Pocklington prospered on wool and its position on the road to York, and in 1514 John Dolman founded Pocklington School, now the 67th oldest school in the country; its best known former pupil is the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, who studied there in the 1770s. The Pocklington Canal followed much later, authorised by Parliament in 1815 and opened in 1818, climbing nine locks and around 101 feet from the River Derwent into the town; it carried working traffic until 1932, fell derelict, and has been rescued lock by lock since 1969, most recently a stretch reopened in 2018 exactly two hundred years after the canal itself first opened.

The town's building record shows a clean split by date. Georgian and early Victorian brick buildings are almost all pantile, from Oak House around 1690 to Devonshire Mill of 1808 and Waterloo Buildings of 1828, while the buildings the railway brought after 1847, the station itself, its former goods shed and station master's house among them, are consistently slate instead. All Saints' Church, the oldest building in the town, is built in limestone under a lead roof. With the town's population growing at one of the higher rates in the East Riding since 2011, the newer estates around that older core are now as much a part of the roofing work here as the listed buildings on the Pavement and Railway Street.