Roofers in Torpoint

The grid of terraced streets laid out for the men working at Devonport still runs down to the water. In the air raids of 1941, 116 of Torpoint's 918 houses were destroyed and more than 700 damaged, so the old streets are a mix of original terraces and post-war rebuilding. The estates came after: Hamoaze and Cremyll from 1945, Queens Park in the early fifties, and Millvale, Great Park and Borough Park from 1975, which puts most of the town's roofs somewhere between fifty and eighty years old. Out on the peninsula the houses change again. Millbrook sits at the head of a tidal creek that has been dammed since 1977. Kingsand, which was in Devon until 1844, and Cawsand are a tangle of cottages on the slope above the bay: rubble or rendered walls, slate roofs, some upper floors slate hung, some roofs re-covered long ago in asbestos-cement slate, and lanes too narrow for a van in places.

Torpoint faces Devonport across the Hamoaze, the Tamar's tidal estuary, rather than the open Sound, which gives it some shelter. The far end of the peninsula is another matter: Kingsand and Cawsand look out over Cawsand Bay, and a south-westerly comes round Rame Head with salt in it, so nails rust, slates slide and lead lifts sooner than they would a few miles inland.

We reach Torpoint by the ferry or the Tamar Bridge, whichever is quicker that day, and that is our problem to plan, not yours. In Kingsand and Cawsand the lanes decide how a scaffold goes up and where materials can be dropped, so we look before we price. Kingsand and Cawsand sit in the Cornwall National Landscape and Antony and Sheviock in the Tamar Valley one, though Torpoint itself is in neither; Kingsand and Cawsand, Antony, Sheviock and Portwrinkle are conservation areas, so a change of roof material there needs checking with Cornwall Council first.

Torpoint, Wilcove and Antony, with Millbrook, Kingsand, Cawsand, Crafthole, Sheviock and Portwrinkle covered from here. Saltash, up the river, has its own page.