Roofers across West Yorkshire

The roofs of West Yorkshire

West Yorkshire's roofs follow its geology. West of a line through Leeds the towns are built in Millstone Grit sandstone and the oldest roofs are stone slate: the Elland Flags around Halifax were being split for roofing in the fourteenth century and Bradford's own sandstone slates were the universal roof there until the railways brought lighter Welsh slate in the mid 1800s. Leeds and Wakefield, sitting on clay and the Coal Measures, are brick towns with grey Welsh slate roofs. Kirklees still names stone flags and UK slate as the traditional roof of the district.

This is also the only part of Britain where back-to-back houses survive in large numbers. Leeds kept building them until 1937 and has around 19,500 left, mostly in Harehills, Beeston Hill, Holbeck and Armley, and Bradford and Halifax keep their own. Around every town centre sit the inter-war and post-war council estates, from Lupset in Wakefield to Holme Wood in Bradford and Seacroft in Leeds, most of them on their first concrete tile roof.

Altitude is the other thing that matters. Queensbury above Bradford sits at around 1,100 feet, and the moors above Halifax and Huddersfield see lying snow for over a month a year. A roof in Marsden or Todmorden takes weather a roof in Garforth never sees, and we fix accordingly.

Beyond the five cities, three belts of smaller towns each have their own character. The Calder Valley west of Halifax, Sowerby Bridge, Elland, Brighouse, Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge and Todmorden among them, shares the Elland Flags stone slate tradition on ground too narrow in places for an ordinary terrace; Hebden Bridge takes that furthest, with "over and under" houses that stack two separate homes into one four or five storey terrace to make use of a hillside with almost no flat land. Wharfedale to the north is a different kind of town again: Otley, Ilkley and Bingley grew on printing machinery, Victorian hydropathy and canal engineering rather than coal or wool, and their stone terraces and villas sit inside conservation areas that still specify gritstone walls and stone or slate roofs street by street. Further south and east, the coalfield and quarrying towns around Wakefield and Kirklees, Ossett, Normanton and the villages beyond Huddersfield, bring brick into the county's roofing vocabulary alongside the stone.

West Yorkshire has not always been run this way. The county council set up in 1974 was abolished under the Local Government Act 1985, along with England's other metropolitan county councils, and since 1986 the five metropolitan boroughs, Leeds, Bradford, Kirklees, Calderdale and Wakefield, have run housing, planning and roads as separate authorities, only pooling transport and economic policy through a combined authority that gained its first directly elected mayor in 2021. At around 2,029 square kilometres it is one of the smaller Yorkshire counties by area but, with something over two million people across those five boroughs, comfortably the most crowded, which is exactly why a shared roof, a back-to-back party wall or a terrace built hard against its neighbour is so often the normal job here rather than the exception.