Roofers in Kingsmead

Walk along a Georgian street in Kingsmead and you see a stone front, a cornice and a parapet. The roof behind is set back out of view, and between the roof and the parapet sits the gutter that does most of the work. It is a shallow trough, lined with lead and laid to a fall towards an outlet, and every slate on that slope sheds its rain into it. When it fails, the water does not drip down the outside of the wall. It goes into the wall and the timbers.

The lead in these gutters is fixed in lengths, and each length laps over the next at a step called a drip. If the drips are too few, or the sheets are too long, the metal creeps downhill and tears at the folds. Old repairs make it worse: a patch of bitumen smeared over a split holds for a season, then lifts, and now there are two problems in the same place. We look for the original pattern of drips and rolls (the raised timber cores that lead is wrapped over at the joints) and repair to it.

Valleys work on the same principle where two roof pitches meet. The slates are cut to the line of the valley, the lead below carries the water, and a blocked or split valley sends it sideways under the slates. A pigeon nest or a handful of moss in the valley is enough to start the problem, which is one reason a tidy gutter is the cheapest repair on any roof.

Once we have lifted the slates at the edge and seen the lead, we tell you which of three jobs it is: a clean-out, a local repair to the split, or a new run of lead to a better layout. Where the lead is beyond saving, our lead roofing work covers re-laying the gutter, the flashings and the rolls in matching detail, because a Georgian roof should look from the street exactly as it did.

After the 2018 review, Kingsmead runs to the river and covers most of the city centre, so a good share of its buildings are used for trade, not for living. Where Green Park station once stood there is now a shopping area, and the pattern is the same across the ward: shops with flats above, offices in converted houses, and rear extensions with flat roofs added to Georgian buildings long after they were built.

Flat roofs are a different problem from a slate slope. They are laid almost level, so water lingers on them, and the membrane (the waterproof layer, whether felt, EPDM rubber, GRP fibreglass or lead) takes the full weight of every puddle. Failure usually starts at an edge, a pipe penetration or a rooflight kerb, not in the middle of the sheet. We check the upstands where the membrane turns up a wall, the outlets, and the deck underneath, because wet insulation or soft boards beneath a new membrane would mean doing the job twice.

Access matters in a city-centre ward. Streets are narrow, pavements are busy, and a scaffold needs planning for pedestrians and neighbours as well as for the roof. We tell you early what the access will involve, so the cost of reaching the roof is known before work starts. For a commercial building we write the scope so that it can be passed to a landlord or managing agent, and work can be phased around trading hours.

Much of this ward sits inside the conservation area, so even a flat roof at the back can be affected by what the council expects to see. Our flat roofing service covers the membranes and the deck, and for shops, offices and shared buildings the scope is set out under commercial roofing. Each starts with a survey, and the written price that follows it is fixed.