Roofers across South Yorkshire

The roofs of South Yorkshire

Steel and coal shaped almost every roof in South Yorkshire. Sheffield's earliest factory hands were packed into brick back-to-backs and court dwellings under slate at Walkley, Crookes, Heeley, Attercliffe and Brightside; the grander Victorian and Edwardian suburbs that came next, Nether Edge, Broomhill and Hillsborough among them, kept the same natural slate with a brick stack on every party wall. Masbrough, Eastwood and Templeborough in Rotherham, and Hexthorpe and Balby in Doncaster, belong to that same railway-age generation.

No English city built council housing faster than Sheffield did between the wars: something like 28,000 new homes went up at Parson Cross, Shiregreen, Arbourthorne, the Manor and Wybourn alone. Rotherham added over 3,000 more at East Dene, Herringthorpe, Canklow and Meadowbank by 1930, while Doncaster's own colliery firms planned whole settlements from scratch at Woodlands and New Rossington. Park Hill, Gleadless Valley and Newhill followed after 1945, ringed by ordinary semis around almost every pit that was still working. Nearly all of it carries its first concrete tile even now, hence the roof-renewal programmes each council currently runs on its own stock.

Nowhere shows the coalfield more purely than Barnsley and the Dearne Valley. The market town grew up around its own pits, and the National Coal Board then planted entire villages around theirs: Wombwell, Cudworth, Royston, Grimethorpe and Goldthorpe were each built for a single colliery that no longer exists. What is left is street after street of NCB and council semis from the 1920s to the 1960s, most never re-roofed since, apart from Penistone and the moorland villages further west, an older stone-built district with nothing in common with the coalfield beside it.

Climate splits the county the same way materials do. Out west, Sheffield's hillside suburbs run up towards 600 metres of Pennine moor and catch the weather first. Out east, Doncaster lies flat on the Don's own floodplain, so a roof there fails through standing water, poor falls and the legacy of the 2007 and 2019 floods far more often than through wind alone.

South Yorkshire itself is a young administrative creation laid over a much older geography. The county was formed on 1 April 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972, stitched together from 32 former local authority districts, four of them county boroughs, into the four metropolitan boroughs, Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster and Barnsley, that still run housing and planning today. It covers 1,552 square kilometres and is home to around 1.43 million people: small enough that repointing a chimney in Sheffield before lunch and re-slating a roof in Barnsley by teatime is an ordinary Tuesday for us, not a boast.