Roofers in Thurnscoe

The roofs of Thurnscoe

Thurnscoe is a village that a railway genuinely cuts in two. The line was laid to serve Hickleton Main Colliery, which found the Barnsley seam in 1894 and turned a small farming settlement into a mining one, and it still runs east/west through the middle, splitting Thurnscoe from Thurnscoe East. Almost the whole of the eastern side was built as low-cost terraced housing for the workforce, and by 1980 mining accounted for 81 per cent of all male employment in the village. Hickleton merged with Goldthorpe Colliery in 1986, and both closed for good in 1994.

What makes Thurnscoe different from the other Dearne Valley pit villages on this site is what has happened since. Many of the original council and National Coal Board terraces have been demolished, along with the Victorian schools, the Station Hotel, a swimming baths, a cinema and the old market, and a redevelopment project that started on site in early 2010 is rebuilding the village in a series of "character areas", defined by housing type and form, under one master-planning strategy rather than street by street. Part of that has already landed on the old colliery ground itself: a £2.1 million scheme of new social housing next to the former colliery officers' club, with matching work to the boundary wall and access. It leaves Thurnscoe with a genuinely mixed roofing job, older colliery terraces still standing on the west side of the line, and new-build housing going up where the pit and its buildings used to be.

The older fabric that survives predates the coal entirely. The tower of St Helen's Church on the High Street is the oldest structure in the village, raised by the Angles in 812 and rebuilt by the Normans in 1087, and Red House Cottage nearby, from the 16th century, is the oldest complete building standing. Thurnscoe has no conservation area of its own, it is not among Barnsley's 18, so none of this is protected the way stone-belt towns further west are, and a re-roof here is judged on what actually keeps the water out rather than on matching a designated palette.