Roofers in Plymouth

The council's own description of the city's traditional building is limestone, granite and the soft local shale called shillet, usually rendered, with slate on the roofs, and that is what most of the older streets are: Georgian and Victorian houses in Stoke and Stonehouse, Victorian and Edwardian villas in Mannamead, Edwardian terraces in Peverell, Lipson and Greenbank. A third of the homes in Plymouth are terraced, against 23 per cent across England, so a lot of roofs here share a party wall, a chimney stack and a valley gutter with the house next door. Slate that old is usually still sound; the nails holding it are not, and that is why slipped slates are the call we expect most from those streets. Where a house has been split into flats, one roof can have several owners, and a landlord or managing agent who never sees it. The centre was bombed in March and April 1941 and rebuilt from 1947 to Abercrombie and Paton Watson's Plan for Plymouth; it is now a conservation area in its own right for its post-war buildings. Further out are the estates that followed, Ernesettle among the first, Southway through the fifties and sixties, Estover and Eggbuckland in the seventies, with 1930s Crownhill between them. Those roofs have reached the age of porous tiles, cracked ridge mortar and felt that has perished at the eaves.

Plymouth faces south onto the Sound, the wind blows mostly from the south-west, and the city gets around 980 millimetres of rain a year, more on the high ground towards Dartmoor. Rain arrives sideways, salt reaches every street rather than just the Hoe and the Barbican, and the first autumn gale finds every loose ridge tile and every slate hanging by one nail.

A terrace with a back lane is straightforward; a terrace on a steep street with no rear access is where the scaffold has to be planned before the price is, and we do that on the free roof check rather than adding it afterwards. Shared stacks and party walls mean we talk to the neighbours when a job crosses the line between two roofs.

Plymouth has 15 conservation areas, among them the Barbican, the Hoe, the Stonehouse peninsula, Devonport, Stoke, Mannamead and Tamerton Foliot. Like-for-like repairs and re-slating are normally fine there; changing the material or adding roof windows on a front slope is where the council needs to be asked first, and we tell you before you commit to anything.

The whole city: the Barbican, the Hoe, Stonehouse, Devonport, Stoke, Mutley, Mannamead, Peverell, Hartley, Greenbank, Lipson, Laira, Efford, St Budeaux, Ernesettle, Whitleigh, Honicknowle, Crownhill, Derriford, Southway, Estover, Eggbuckland and Leigham, with Tamerton Foliot, Roborough and Woolwell at the northern edge. Plympton, Plymstock, Saltash, Torpoint, Ivybridge, Yelverton and Wembury each have their own page.