Roofers in Sherburn in Elmet

The roofs of Sherburn in Elmet

All Saints Church has a 12th-century nave and north aisle, with later additions including a 16th-century clerestory, so there has been a settlement here for the best part of nine hundred years. Sherburn's more dramatic moment came five centuries later: the town served as a Royalist garrison during the English Civil War and saw significant military action in 1645, the year the war turned decisively against the King. Sherburn sits on the same Permian magnesian limestone ridge as Tadcaster six miles north, described in its own right as still an important source of clear water for that town's brewing industry.

The town's most distinctive chapter, though, is aviation rather than agriculture or ale. Sherburn-in-Elmet Airfield began in the 1920s as a base for the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club, with the writer and aeronautical engineer Nevil Shute a member and management committee contributor. From 1940, Blackburn Aircraft used a Ministry of Aircraft Production factory on the airfield to build 1,699 Fairey Swordfish naval torpedo aircraft, the biplane that famously helped cripple the Bismarck, and the Airborne Forces Experimental Establishment was based there from June 1942 to January 1945, researching glider and parachute deployment for the whole of the Allied airborne effort. Several RAF squadrons trained there during the war. The airfield never closed after 1945: private pilots and aero clubs kept flying from it, the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club ran international air rallies there in the early 1950s, and it still operates today as a working general-aviation airfield right next to the town.

That combination, working wartime aircraft factory, medieval church and Civil War garrison all in one small limestone-ridge town, is not something any other town on our patch can claim. It also means Sherburn's building stock spans genuinely different eras side by side: the older core around the church, mid-century housing built up alongside the airfield's post-war expansion, and newer estates and commercial units on the edge of town, each needing a different approach to a re-roof or a repair.