Roofers in Thorne

The roofs of Thorne

Thorne was already a settlement by around AD 700 and appears in the Domesday Book, but its modern shape comes from 1626, when Charles I sent the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to drain the surrounding wetland of Hatfield Chase. Vermuyden is recorded as having lived at the Old Hall on Queen Street during the works, and his backers brought settlers over from Holland, Belgium and France to farm the reclaimed land, which is why local history still calls Thorne "Little Holland". The result is on the roofs, not just in the name: Thorne's own listed buildings around the Market Place, among them the 1737 White Hart and the roughly 1700 house Lockermarsh, are brick under pantile, a lowland covering brought in with the drainage rather than the stone the Pennine towns on this site use.

A second, unconnected trade then grew on the same reclaimed ground. As river and canal traffic on the Don increased, Thorne filled with shipyards, warehouses, ropemakers and sailmakers, and Richard Dunston began building wooden barges here in 1858, a yard that grew into one of the country's major inland shipbuilders. That history has not been demolished, it has been renamed: the housing estates on the old yards now carry street names such as Rope Walk, Capstan Way, Windlass Close and Dunstan Drive. Coal came later and separately. Thorne Colliery, sunk from 1909 by Pease & Partners of Darlington, took until 1924 to reach coal, one of the longest and most troubled shaft sinkings in British mining history because of persistent water, and the pit village of Moorends grew up specifically to house its workforce.

None of this sits above sea level by much. Thorne is on the Humberhead Levels, one of the lowest-lying parts of England, and neighbouring Moorends stands at about two metres. Thorntree Internal Drainage Board manages the stretch of the River Don past Thorne to Moorends by pump and embankment rather than by gravity, and the same floodplain put the record 6.31 metre level on the Don at Doncaster in November 2019, with Fishlake, a few miles away, the worst hit. On ground drained by engineering in the first place, keeping water moving off a roof and away from a wall is not an abstract concern here.