Roofers in Scunthorpe

The roofs of Scunthorpe

Scunthorpe is a steel town in northern Lincolnshire, on the south bank of the Humber and not in Yorkshire, formed from five villages, Ashby, Brumby, Crosby, Frodingham and Scunthorpe, that grew together after iron ore was found in 1859 and the population went from around 1,400 to 25,000 in sixty years. New Frodingham is the clearest survival: a late nineteenth-century planned settlement built under the Winn family for ironworkers, grid terraces of uniform two-storey red-brick houses under orange pantiles, protected as a conservation area since 1986, with the ironstone school and church beside it. Old Crosby, the historic village between Frodingham Road and Normanby Road, is the other conservation area.

Orange clay pantiles predominate here, in the words of the council's own appraisal, and the wider northern Lincolnshire vernacular is warm limestone with dark brown pantiles. When the New Frodingham terraces were restored in the 1990s they were re-covered in clay; the 1950s community centre nearby has concrete pantiles, which tells you what happened on most roofs in between. Land released in Crosby before 1938 created the first continuous urban area and its inter-war semis, then the 1950s Westcliff estate, the fourteen-storey Langland House of 1963, three twenty-storey Crosby Road towers of 1966 and the Anchor village built east of Ashby for the steelworks in the late 1960s, all of which still stand.

The town sits on an ironstone ridge, so surface water rather than the river is the usual weather problem in the town itself, while the Trent-side villages such as Burringham carry the river risk and flooded in Storm Babet. Ongo, the housing association that owns much of the former council stock, is regenerating Westcliff. No named re-roofing programme was running when we researched this page, so we say planned maintenance rather than quote one, and for the private owner on a 1950s Westcliff or 1930s Crosby house the roof is now the oldest thing on it.