Roofers in Richmond

The roofs of Richmond

Richmond Castle's keep and walls, enclosing what is now the Market Place, were finished in 1086, and the town has grown around that footprint ever since. Georgian prosperity in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries left its clearest mark on Newbiggin and in Frenchgate, and the Georgian Theatre Royal, built in 1788, is recorded as the UK's most complete eighteenth-century theatre; it spent over a century as a warehouse after closing in 1848 before reopening in 1963. One of Europe's first gas works was built in the town in 1830, and Richmond Racecourse ran from 1765 to 1891. None of that, though, is what shapes the town most today. Wikipedia's own account of Richmond states plainly that "the single largest influence" on the town now is the adjoining Catterick Garrison, the British Army's largest garrison, with tourism as the other pillar of the local economy, the town serving as a gateway to Swaledale and the Yorkshire Dales.

That garrison influence changes the roofing job as much as it changes the local economy. A market town with a large, rotating population of forces families and a steady flow of short lets and holiday cottages around the castle keeps its housing stock turning over faster than most, and Richmond's roofs are a genuine mix rather than one dominant material. The listed buildings around the Market Place and on Bridge Street include stone slate on 15 Bridge Street and the King's Head Hotel, Welsh slate on 21 Trinity Church Square and The Grove, plain slate on St Mary's Church and 9 Market Place, and pantile mixed in with slate on 58 and 59 Market Place. On a street of Georgian stone and brick town houses it is genuinely not safe to assume the roof next door tells you what is on the one you are quoting for.

Richmond is also a river town on a hill, and the River Swale has made that plain: a June 2000 flood caused what is recorded as considerable structural damage to Mercury Bridge, with repairs costing around half a million pounds. Between a valley river prone to sudden spate and a hilltop castle site exposed to the weather coming up Swaledale, the roofs here take a genuine battering from both directions, which is exactly why the gutters and valleys matter as much as the covering above them.