History

The tradition of thatching has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. Few descriptions of the building techniques exist, especially in regions.

In equatorial countries thatch is the prevalent local material for, and often. There are diverse building techniques from the Hale shelter made from the local leaves and of fan palms to the Na Bure home with layered reed walls and leaf roofs and the Kikuyu tribal homes in The of indigenous lands by greatly diminished the use of thatching.

Records of European thatch date back to before the,when the first were established. The creation of villages brought with it the need for readily available, inexpensive, and durable building material, such as thatch.

“Thatch houses built in close proximity helped to account for the frequent and disastrous fires that swept through the narrow streets of medieval citiesEventually the authorities wrote the of arguably the first building regulation in force in ,prohibiting the building of new thatch roofs and demanding the whitewashing of existing ones with daub

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Early settlers to the used thatch as far back as had already been using thatch for generations. When settlers arrived in, they found Powhatan Indians living in houses with thatched roofs. The colonists used the same thatch on their own buildings.In the early years of the 19th century thatching was in decline. The had begun in and the mobility which the and then the made possible meant that other materials became readily available.

To compound this, the raised the price of and to a prohibitive level in. The number of thatchers declined, as the tradition became regarded as unfashionable. in the has had a negative impact on the popularity of thatching. Use of the material declined following the First World War in particular, and with the invention of the combine harvester and the need to develop shorter stemmed varieties of wheat, the long straw once produced was no longer available.

The increased loss of waterplantswildlife occurred with the shift from open ponds to cattle troughs and piped water for animals. With it came the decline in availability of rushes, and other wetland vegetation used in thatching.

With renewed interest in historic architecture and the trend towards using more sustainable materials, thatching is once again in the ascendancy.