Roofers in Torquay

The hills above the harbour, Wellswood, the Lincombes and the Warberries, are lined with the villas Torquay grew rich on: tall, stuccoed, slate-roofed, with hipped roofs, deep eaves, ornate chimneys and long runs of valley and hip that were built for a household with staff to look after them. Many are now flats, with a management company or a group of leaseholders paying for a roof that was designed to be maintained every few years and has not been. Below them, Torre and Ellacombe are terraces and semis of the same century on a smaller scale, and Babbacombe and St Marychurch mix Victorian villas with bungalows and post-war housing.

Further out, Shiphay, Barton, Hele and Watcombe are largely twentieth-century: 1930s semis with hipped concrete-tile roofs, council-built estates from the 1950s and 60s, and later infill. These roofs are simpler and cheaper to work on, and the common faults are the ones concrete tiles get everywhere: moss, porous tiles after fifty years, ridge mortar gone, felt perished.

Torbay faces east, which shelters the town from the worst of the south-westerlies but leaves it wide open to an easterly gale, and an easterly is what hits the seafront and the harbour hardest. Salt air reaches every roof in the town, not just the ones with a sea view, and on slate roofs it is the nails it goes for: the slate is fine, the fixing rusts, and the slate slides. On the villas the sheer size of the roof is the problem, because a single failed valley or a cracked lead gutter behind a parapet can be pouring water into a building for a season before anyone below notices.

Getting a scaffold to a Torquay roof is half the job. The roads climb, the drives are short and steep, and a good many of the villas have their front door two storeys above their back garden. We plan access before we quote and price the scaffold into the job rather than adding it afterwards.

Torbay Council lists 24 conservation areas across the bay, 16 of them in Torquay, including the harbour. In a conservation area a like-for-like repair or re-roof is normally fine, but changing the roofing material or the look of a front elevation can need permission, and we tell you before you commit to anything.

Torquay itself, and with it Wellswood, Meadfoot, Babbacombe, St Marychurch, Torre, Ellacombe, Upton, Chelston, Cockington, Livermead, Shiphay, Barton, Hele, Watcombe and Maidencombe. Kingskerswell and Marldon are covered from here too. For the other two Torbay towns, see the Paignton page and the Brixham page.