Roofers in Wakefield

The roofs of Wakefield

Wakefield is the brick-and-coalfield city of West Yorkshire. It sits on the Coal Measures at the eastern edge of the Pennines, lower and drier than the stone towns to the west, and brick is what it is built from: the Victorian railway viaduct alone used eight hundred million of them. The Georgian streets around St John's Square and the Parades are the only large Georgian development in the city and sit in a conservation area, with Welsh slate on Georgian and Victorian roofs and clay and concrete tile on almost everything since.

The coal rush of the mid 1800s turned the surrounding hamlets into pit villages with streets of back-to-back and terraced colliery housing; Silkstone Row at Altofts was once the longest unbroken row of colliery terraces in Europe. Then came the estates. Lupset, begun in 1924 with bricks from the Westgate works, had more than 2,700 houses by 1937 and was described as the largest local authority housing scheme in Europe. Portobello, Flanshaw, Plumpton, Peacock, Eastmoor and Kettlethorpe followed. Vico Homes, the former WDH, still owns more than thirty thousand homes across the district, and much of the rest of that estate housing is now owner-occupied and reaching a hundred years old.

The city-centre tower blocks of the 1960s are being demolished rather than refurbished, and the housing company tenders roofing work district-wide to keep older roofs going until they are replaced. For private owners on the same streets, the roof on a 1920s or 1930s Lupset or Eastmoor house is now the oldest thing on it and the reason we get called.