Roofers in Paignton

Around Winner Street, Church Street and the station the town is Victorian: terraces and villas with slate roofs, brick chimneys and cast-iron gutters, some of it in the Old Paignton conservation area. Preston and the roads behind the seafront are 1930s semis and bungalows, hipped roofs in concrete tile with the bay windows and flat-roofed porches of the period. Goodrington and Roselands are post-war, with council and private estates of the 1950s to 1970s, and Foxhole and Great Parks brought the next wave. On the edge of the town, White Rock and the newer estates towards Collaton St Mary are modern builds with interlocking tiles on trussed roofs.

So the typical Paignton roof is fifty to ninety years old, concrete tiled, and reaching the age where the tiles have gone porous, the ridge mortar has cracked and the felt beneath has perished. That is a re-roof waiting to happen or a run of repairs, and which one is right depends on how much of the roof has gone.

The seafront green and Preston Sands face straight out into the bay, and an easterly comes across them with nothing in the way. Roofs on the flat land behind the front take that wind on the ridge and the verges, which is where the mortar fails. Paignton also has an unusual number of flat roofs, because so many of its houses have had extensions, garages and porches added since the 1960s, and a felt flat roof from that era is at the end of its life now.

Most Paignton roofs are reached from a level drive or a wide pavement, so scaffold and towers are straightforward and quick to put up. Old Paignton is one of four conservation areas in the town; elsewhere, a like-for-like roof needs no permission, and rooflights or a change of material on a front elevation are the things to check first.

Paignton, Preston, Goodrington, Roselands, Foxhole, Great Parks, White Rock, Collaton St Mary, Blagdon and Marldon, with Galmpton and Churston covered from here or from Brixham. Torquay and Brixham are written up separately.