Roofers in Royston

The roofs of Royston

Royston appears in the Domesday Book as Rorestone, a settlement named for a man called Hror or Roarr, and stayed a farming village on the edge of the West Riding until the Barnsley Canal reached it in the 1790s. Monckton Colliery, working from 1878 to 1966, then Royston Drift Mine from 1975 to 1989, employed the village for most of a century between them. The 64-hectare Rabbit Ings Country Park now stands on their former ground, opened in 2011 on reclaimed colliery land and managed by the Land Trust since 2012, and it is recorded as home to all five owl species found in Britain.

At the centre of the village stands a genuinely rare building. The Church of St John the Baptist was built around 1234, largely rebuilt across three phases in the fifteenth century with some fourteenth century fabric surviving, restored by the architect J. L. Pearson in 1867 to 1869, and given Grade I listed status in 1966, a tier above every other church on this side of Barnsley. It is one of only a handful of Church of England churches with an oriel window, a five-sided, three-stage projection with cusped lights and a small pyramidal roof of its own, historically used as a landmark to guide travellers across the surrounding country before road signs existed.

Royston's other claim to fame walked out of one of its terraces. Charlie Williams was born here to a father who had arrived in Britain from Barbados in 1914, served in the Royal Engineers, and settled in the village selling groceries from a horse and cart. Charlie left school at fourteen to work at Upton Colliery, played for the colliery football team, then signed for Doncaster Rovers in 1948 aged nineteen as one of the first Black professional footballers in post-war Britain, before becoming Britain's first well-known Black stand-up comedian on Granada's The Comedians and ATV's The Golden Shot. None of that changes the roofing, which is ordinary colliery terraces and inter-war semis under slate and concrete tile, but it is not a village without a story.