Roofers in Trowbridge

Trowbridge has a conservation area called Newtown, a protected zone of mostly Victorian houses. Living inside one does not stop a roof being repaired. The rule exists because the council keeps an eye on how a street looks, and a roof seen from the pavement is part of that appearance. A patch that shifts the colour, the size or the texture of the covering will be noticed by the neighbours long before the council hears of it.

A Victorian roof is a covering on sawn softwood timbers, with lead wherever it meets chimneys and walls. The slate or tile can outlive the timber and the nails beneath it. When a slate drops, the cause is generally the fixing rather than the slate itself, so a sound repair deals with the fixing. We lift the courses around the gap, inspect the battens (the thin timber rails each slate is nailed to) and the nail holes, then tell you whether the trouble is three or four slates or a roof whose fixings have all run their course.

Matching is the whole point. A slate roof is mended with slate of a similar size and shade, reclaimed where new would look too sharp beside weathered neighbours. A clay-tiled roof gets clay tiles from the same family. Man-made substitutes weather differently, and in a run of original roofs they show up like a patch of new paint on an old door.

Whether Building Regulations apply depends on the scale of the work, not on the street. Replacing a small share of a roof is treated differently from stripping the lot, and bigger jobs can bring a thermal upgrade with them. If you want to know what Newtown's designation means for your own house, Wiltshire Council's planning team can answer, and we will give you a precise description of the repair to take to them. For slate and tile in general, see pitched roofing.

The cloth and brewing trades left large buildings behind, and some have found second lives. Clark's Mill now holds offices, Salter's Home Mill houses the town museum, and the former Usher's brewery site now has town centre flats by Newland Homes, built to incorporate the frontage of the Usher's building. Roofs on converted sites differ from a house roof because they are shared, often flat or shallow, and joined to an older structure with its own history.

A flat roof has no spare margin for standing water. A fall that has settled (the slight slope that drains it), an outlet half clogged with leaves, or a membrane peeling at an upstand will show as a stain or a drip below within a season. We survey the whole roof rather than the visible leak, since the point where water enters is seldom the point where it appears. Our flat roofing page covers the main finishes: EPDM, a single synthetic rubber sheet; GRP, a skin of resin and glass fibre set down on site; and lead.

On a shared roof the difficulty is often people rather than materials. A managing agent needs a defined scope, a written fixed price and a short description of the job so that leaseholders can be told. We write our findings so they can be circulated, with photographs, and we mark every joint between new covering and old fabric, because that junction is where replacement membranes most often let go.

Commercial units and offices around the centre follow the same reasoning. A roof on such a building is priced on survey, because system, insulation, access and edge details each change what the job involves. Anything involving a listed frontage also needs the consent question closed before a fixed sum can be quoted.