The History Of Thatch

Ever since Stone Age people moved out of their warm and dry caves to live a more

nomadic lifestyle they had a need for a more temporary yet hardy place to live. This led to the use of natural vegetation to create temporary thatch housing made out of bracken, heather and wild grasses.

The first settled thatch towns

As communities around the world became more settled and they began to grow more and more cereal crops such as rye, oats and wheat they started to use the by-product of each years harvest to build roofing for their dwellings. This in fact became the standard method of roofing in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the British Isles for centuries, especially in the more rural areas.

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In many areas of Europe, but especially in places such as northern and western England slate became more readily available during the early 1800s and replaced thatch as the roofing raw material of choice for the majority of city and large town dwellings. The popularity of slate over thatch tiling was assured when during the Victorian age slate was transported easily by rail and used for almost all of the great building projects (of which there were many) of the time.

Thatch roofing at this time was viewed by people as a poor mans roofing and during the Victorian era not only were all new houses and buildings built using slate, but even existing thatch structures had their roofs converted into slate tile roofs.

This trend of converting thatch roofs into slate was accelerated during the late 1930s by the invention of the combined harvester in the USA. These machines chopped up the wheat and cereal crops and rendered them useless as a thatching raw material. After the Second World War British farmer adopted this automated farming method in their droves, further hastening the downfall of the use of thatch as a roofing material. In fact, during the early 1960s it was almost impossible to find thatch in many parts of the UK and Western Europe.

As recently as the late 1960s thatched cottages in the centre of Stratford upon Avon in the UK had their roofs replaced with tiles in the last great 'modernisation' rush experienced in the UK. This surge of modernization ended in the early 1970's as local authority conservation departments reversed their historical modernization policy and encouraged the re-thatching of historical buildings where appropriate.

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