History of Thatch in Britain

For most of recorded history, the ordinary rural roof in Britain was thatch: straw, reed or other plants laid thickly on a timber frame. It was cheap, locally grown and warm. Industrial materials displaced it in the 19th and 20th centuries, but Britain still has one of the largest stocks of thatched buildings in Europe.

Long dominance

Thatch remained the main roofing material for most of England's rural population until the late 1800s. Regional practice varied with local crops and wetlands. Research funded by Historic Scotland found Scottish thatch made of broom, heather, rushes, cereal straw, bracken, turf and clay, among other materials.

Urban bans

Towns turned against thatch because of fire. After a major fire in 1212, London banned new thatched roofs and required existing ones to be plastered over. Bans on thatch and timber were repeatedly ignored because the materials were cheap, and thatch was still present when the Great Fire of 1666 led to stricter rebuilding rules. The original Globe Theatre burned down in 1613 when a stage cannon set its thatch alight; the modern reconstruction, opened in 1997, has water reed over a fire-protected roof.

Decline

Distribution of Welsh slate from around 1820, then canals and railways, made slate and tile affordable far from their sources. Thatch numbers rose in the mid-1800s, then fell late in the century with agricultural recession and rural depopulation. Corrugated iron also replaced thatch on many farm buildings.

Materials

Three main traditions survive in England:

• Long straw, threshed wheat straw laid with a shaggy finish;
• Combed wheat reed, straw combed to keep the stems aligned;
• Water reed, traditionally used mainly in East Anglia; over 80% of the UK's water reed is now imported.

Modern short-stemmed wheat and combine harvesting weakened straw quality, and since the 1980s growers have revived older heritage wheat varieties for thatching.

Survival and age

A 2013 estimate put the number of thatched properties in the UK at about 60,000, served by roughly 1,000 full-time thatchers. More than 250 roofs in southern England retain base coats laid more than 500 years ago, a valuable record of medieval crops. Because roofs are re-coated rather than stripped, thatch on some buildings has built up to over 2.1 m (7 ft) thick. Between 50 and 80 thatched roofs are lost to fire in the UK each year.