Roofers across South Yorkshire

The roofs of South Yorkshire

South Yorkshire's housing was built for steel and coal. Sheffield's first industrial workforce lived in brick back-to-backs and court housing roofed with slate in Walkley, Crookes, Heeley, Attercliffe and Brightside, and the Victorian and Edwardian suburbs that followed, Nether Edge, Broomhill, Crookes and Hillsborough among them, are still natural slate roofs with brick chimney stacks on every party wall. Rotherham's Masbrough, Eastwood and Templeborough and Doncaster's railway terraces at Hexthorpe and Balby are the same generation.

Between the wars the councils built on a scale few places matched. Sheffield alone put up around 28,000 council homes on Parson Cross, Shiregreen, Arbourthorne, the Manor and Wybourn; Rotherham had built more than 3,000 at East Dene, Herringthorpe, Canklow and Meadowbank by 1930; Doncaster's colliery companies built model villages such as Woodlands and New Rossington. After the war came Park Hill, Gleadless Valley, Newhill and the estates around every pit. Most of that stock is still under its first concrete tile roof, which is why all three councils are now running roof-renewal programmes on their own homes.

The weather divides the county too. Sheffield's western suburbs climb towards Pennine hills of 600 metres and take the wind and rain first. Doncaster sits on the flat Don floodplain, where the roofing problems are drainage, flat roofs and the aftermath of the 2007 and 2019 floods rather than exposure.