Roofers in Wetherby

The roofs of Wetherby

Wetherby earned its living from the road, not the mill. Recorded as "Wedrebi" in the Domesday Book of 1086, it was granted a royal market charter by Henry III in 1240, and its position on the Great North Road midway between London and Edinburgh, with a crossing over the River Wharfe, made it one of the great coaching towns of the North: 26 inns with stabling for over 1,000 horses by the 18th century, rising to as many as forty inns and alehouses at the coaching era's height. Wetherby Bridge, the parish's oldest structure, was rebuilt on the site of a 13th-century crossing and widened in 1769 to 1773 and again in 1826, and its gritstone arches and 1922 war memorial still carry Boston Road over the Wharfe today.

That coaching and horse-fair culture led directly to Wetherby Racecourse. Informal races began at nearby Linton in 1842, funded by local farming and hunting money with backing from the military. By 1891 they had grown into a permanent course on its current site, which still runs National Hunt racing today. The building stock reflects a market and coaching town rather than an industrial one: Leeds City Council's own conservation area appraisal singles out well-matched oolitic magnesian limestone as the defining wall material, a world away from the Pennine sandstone of the mill towns further into West Yorkshire, and listed buildings carry Welsh slate as the most common roof, with pantiles on some of the older coaching-era buildings and mixed slate-and-pantile roofs elsewhere. Only 33 listed buildings survive across the whole parish, all Grade II, and the conservation area itself was first designated in 1971 and modified twice since, in 1981 and 2010.

The Wharfe is the town's real weather story. On Boxing Day 2015, during Storm Eva, the river's own gauge at Wetherby reached 2.87 metres against a typical range of 0.4 to 1.8 metres, and the Environment Agency still runs a named flood warning area covering the town today. On a Wetherby roof that means the leadwork and rainwater goods on the older riverside buildings matter as much as the covering itself, particularly where limestone or gritstone walls meet a slate or pantile roof that has been repaired piecemeal over two centuries.