Roofers in Swinton

The roofs of Swinton

Swinton's story is pottery, not coal, and that puts it on its own among the Dearne Valley towns on this site. The Rockingham Pottery, working under the patronage of Earl Fitzwilliam of nearby Wentworth Woodhouse, became a world-renowned manufacturer of porcelain, gained "Manufacturer to the King" status in 1831 and took on its most famous commission, a dessert service for King William IV that took eight years to complete and was eventually delivered to Queen Victoria instead. It still sits in Windsor Castle today. The factory closed in 1842 when the Earl withdrew his backing, but the Grade II* listed Waterloo Kiln, red brick and about 17 metres high, survives in the Pottery Ponds park along with the old gatehouse and the pottery's own flint mill pond.

That heritage runs right through Swinton's ten listed buildings. Swinton House, from about 1756, and the former Queen's Foundry, from the late nineteenth century, both carry a Welsh slate roof with coped gables, while the older Hawthorne Farmhouse of 1774 and Swinton Hall of about 1800 are roofed in plain tile, and St Margaret's Church, built 1815 to 1817, has red tile roofs of its own. Two genuine roofing traditions on the same short stretch of streets, tile on the eighteenth-century buildings and slate on the grander ones that followed, is not something we see written down this clearly anywhere else on our patch.

Swinton kept working long after the pottery closed: coal, glassmaking, canal barge-building and engineering all followed, the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation still carries traffic along the Don past the derelict Dearne and Dove Canal, and the railway station, closed in the 1968 Beeching cuts, reopened in 1991 once the "Swinton Curve" was restored for a direct Sheffield to Doncaster service. It is a working town built on a hillside above the river, not a preserved one, and the roofing job reflects that: heritage slate and tile on the old core, ordinary terraces and estate housing on the streets around it.