Plumbers in Royston, Barnsley

One town, half a dozen different heating problems

Royston sits about four miles north-east of Barnsley and around six miles south-east of Wakefield, low-lying in a valley on the northern edge of the borough with open countryside to the north and west. Its centre is split between The Wells and Midland Road, and the disused Barnsley Canal and the Trans Pennine Trail run through the eastern side.

The council's own character work on Royston reads almost like a list of heating jobs. There are late Victorian terraces on a loose grid around the centre and at Grays, with sandstone and slate along Lee Lane. There are mid-twentieth-century estates at New Town, Summerfields, Chevet and Meadstead. There is prefabricated housing around The Oval, and streets of bungalows at Northlands. Later development at Common Lane, Pastures and Lynwood is cul-de-sac layout in brick and tile, and a large mixed-use allocation off Lee Lane is bringing several hundred more homes.

Bungalows in particular are worth calling out, because they behave differently from a two-storey house. There is no chimney to borrow for a flue, the pipe runs are all on one level, and the boiler and condensate frequently sit in a cold loft where freezing is a real risk in a valley that holds cold air. Victorian terraces bring the opposite set of problems — solid walls, buried pipework and tight flue termination constraints. We work on all of it. Every gas job is carried out by a Gas Safe registered engineer.