Roofers in Stocksbridge

The roofs of Stocksbridge

Stocksbridge exists because Samuel Fox bought a disused corn mill near the town centre in 1842 to make wire for textile pins. Within a decade he had moved into wire for umbrella frames, patenting his own rib, the "Paragon", in 1851, and by the mid-1860s furnaces and rolling mills had been added and the works had moved into railway lines and springs. After the First World War the firm joined Steel, Peech & Tozer of Rotherham and the Appleby-Frodingham Steel Company of Scunthorpe to form the United Steel Companies, and the Stocksbridge works went on to make aerospace steel and springs for Rolls-Royce, employing more than 8,000 people at its height. In 2021 Liberty Steel Group put the business up for sale amid financial difficulties, leaving its future uncertain.

Samuel Fox built the works, then built much of the town's infrastructure around it to house his own workforce, which is why Stocksbridge reads as a company town in the same way as Elsecar or New Frodingham elsewhere in this site's patch. The town, previously in the West Riding, only became part of the City of Sheffield in the 1974 local government reorganisation, and it still shares its S36 postcode with Penistone, ten miles up the valley and already on this site, even though the two towns could hardly be more different: one an old Pennine market town, the other built almost entirely by one steel firm.

Above the valley-floor works sits Bolsterstone, a genuinely older and separate place: a conservation area since 1977, extended into the Peak District National Park in 1994, with part of it inside the Park's own planning authority rather than Sheffield's, an unusual split for a town this size. The parish holds 38 listed buildings, all Grade II, and the oldest fabric on the hill, the gritstone Porters Lodge associated with the demolished Bolsterstone Castle, is dated by a 19th-century plaque to around 1250.