Roofers in Todmorden

The roofs of Todmorden

Todmorden is Yorkshire's cross-border town twice over. The old Yorkshire and Lancashire boundary once ran straight through the middle of it along the Walsden Water, and when the town built its Grade I Town Hall in 1875 the architect John Gibson sited it deliberately over that boundary stream, so the ballroom upstairs stood half in each county and dancers could cross from Yorkshire into Lancashire mid-waltz. The Local Government Act 1888 finally put the whole town in the West Riding, but the border still shows up on every envelope: Todmorden's postcode is OL14, an Oldham postal town, because the sorting office that covers it sits over in Lancashire.

The roofs themselves have a dated turning point that most Yorkshire towns cannot claim. Calderdale's own conservation area appraisal is direct about it: earlier roofs in the town are clad in local stone slate, and later ones in Welsh blue slate, because the Rochdale Canal reaching Todmorden in the 1790s and opening throughout in 1804 let cheaper Welsh slate be imported for the first time. The cotton trade that paid for the building was the Fielden family's: Joshua Fielden began spinning at Laneside in 1782, and by 1832 Fielden Brothers ran nearly 40,000 spindles and 684 power looms, with an estimated one fifth of the town depending on the firm at its peak. Because the valley here is so narrow, that growth had nowhere to spread and instead runs in a single tight line along the valley floor, with older cottages stacked up the hillsides at Cross Stone and Shade, linked by flights of stone steps rather than roads.

Todmorden sits at the meeting of three steep-sided Pennine valleys, which is exactly what made it flood so badly on Boxing Day 2015: Storm Eva stalled over the hills and the Calder rose faster than on record, hitting homes in Walsden, Lydgate, Burnley Road and Halifax Road and cutting the town off completely while the water was highest. On streets built this close to converging becks and a canal, what a roof does with the water that lands on it matters as much as the covering itself.