Roofers in Wombwell

The roofs of Wombwell

Wombwell was open farmland with a small population until the Wombwell Main and Mitchells Main collieries arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century and made the town the hub of the villages around it. Wombwell Main began as a private partnership in August 1853, sinking two shafts to the Barnsley seam, and by 1900 employed 968 men underground and 283 on the surface under manager C. H. Elliott; it became a registered company in 1865 and worked on until nationalisation in 1947. The prosperity it brought paid for the Old Town Hall, its foundation stone laid on 22 June 1897 in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year and designed by the council's own architect John Robinson in a Renaissance style, rubble masonry under a mansard roof behind a balustraded parapet. It stayed in council use for decades and only became a pub with flats in 2012.

Unlike Penistone, Hoyland's Elsecar village or the town centres of Barnsley and Pontefract, Wombwell has never been given a conservation area of its own; it is simply absent from the borough's list of eighteen. That is a description of the town rather than an oversight: a working centre the council is now investing in rather than a set of protected streets, with a housing strategy that has identified room for around 2,000 new homes and a Principal Towns programme that has already put over £300,000 into shopfronts and the public realm along the High Street. For a roofer that means plainer materials and fewer consent conversations than the heritage towns nearby: Welsh slate on the Victorian terraces built for the pits, concrete tile on the estates that followed, most of it old enough now to need attention rather than admiration.

Water is the more pressing fact on the ground. On Friday 15 June 2007 and again on Monday 25 June the River Dove breached its banks through the town, and in the same fortnight the Dearne and Dove Canal overtopped at two separate points, by the A635 Mitchel's Way and on its Elsecar branch at Tingle Bridge Lane, flooding homes and businesses at both. Low Valley, taking in Valley Road, Station Road, Bayford Way, Cotterdale Gardens, Stonyford Road and Henry Street, remains a live Environment Agency flood warning area on the Dove today. None of that is a roofing problem in itself, but it changes what we check first on a Wombwell job: the gutters, valleys and downpipes that decide whether rain reaches a drain or a wall, on ground that has already shown it cannot always take it.