Roofers in Selby

The roofs of Selby

Selby grew up around a Benedictine abbey founded in 1069, and its abbey church still stands as the town's parish church, complete with the 14th-century Washington Window bearing the heraldic arms of the ancestors of George Washington. Henry I is recorded as having been born in Selby around 1068. Two industries then shaped the town for the best part of two centuries. Shipbuilding grew up on the River Ouse, and yards here often had to launch vessels side-on into the water for want of room to launch them any other way; Cochrane and Son's yard, the last of them, closed in 1998. Underneath the surrounding farmland, the Selby Coalfield became, in its time, the leading coal-mining complex in the country, with Wistow Colliery setting the UK record for coal mined in a single week, 200,743 tonnes, in 1995, before the whole complex closed on 14 May 2004.

The roofs left behind by that history are recorded in detail. Abbot's Staith, Grade II* and 15th to 16th century, is built in magnesian limestone with later brick rebuilding, and Corunna House, also Grade II* and early 18th century, is brown brick under a hipped pantile roof with some lead. Across Selby's roughly 130 listed buildings, pantile is the covering recorded on most early 19th-century buildings, with slate and Welsh slate taking over on the later Georgian and Victorian properties, the George Inn, the former Royal Oak, Abbey House and Thorpe Hall among them, so the town's roofline genuinely changes character street by street according to when a building actually went up.

Selby sits low. The town lies within the flat Humberhead Levels, mostly between 5 and 8 metres above sea level, and falls within a flood-alert zone on the tidal River Ouse. In November 2000 the river rose to unusually high levels and affected around 300 properties in Selby and neighbouring Barlby, which led to a formal Selby Flood Alleviation Scheme. None of that touches the roof covering directly, but on ground this flat and this close to a tidal river, gutters, outlets and downpipes that genuinely clear water matter as much as anything on the roof itself.