Roofers in Sowerby Bridge

The roofs of Sowerby Bridge

Sowerby Bridge exists because two canals could not share the same boats. The Rochdale Canal, opened throughout to Manchester in 1804, was built for longer boats than the Calder and Hebble Navigation next to it could take through its shorter locks, and the smaller Calder and Hebble boats were in turn too inefficient to run through the bigger Rochdale locks given the water they used. So this became the transhipment point between the two canal systems, where cargo was unloaded from one size of boat and loaded onto the other, as well as a working port for the surrounding textile towns. The result is still standing at Sowerby Bridge Wharf: four warehouses, the earliest, Warehouse No. 4, dating from 1770 and Grade II* listed as one of the oldest canal warehouses in the country, with the Salt Warehouse added in the 1790s alongside a weighing house, an overseer's house and stables.

The town centre around that wharf was designated a conservation area on 5 June 1984, covering the main shopping street, the mill complex between the canal and the river, a scatter of small courtyards and squares, and the Riverside Project along the restored Rochdale Canal. Above it, on the hilltop, sits Sowerby itself: an older township in its own right, a separate settlement long before the canal age moved the centre of population down into the valley to be near the water and the mills, and still a visibly different, quieter place from the working canal basin below it.

Sitting directly on the Calder at the point the Ryburn and the two canal systems all meet, Sowerby Bridge was one of the towns swamped on Boxing Day 2015, when Storm Eva stalled over the Pennines and the river rose faster than on record across the whole of Calderdale, part of a single day that damaged more than 3,000 homes and around 1,500 businesses. On a site with this much moving water converging in one place, keeping rainwater off a roof and away from a wall properly is not a minor detail.