Roofers in Walcot

The municipal Walcot East estate was built mostly in the 1950s, and many of its first tenants were Londoners who had struggled to find homes after the Blitz. Houses put up for that kind of programme were laid out in pairs and short terraces to a repeated pattern, which means one house's roof problem is very likely to be the next house's problem too. On houses of that vintage the covering is frequently a concrete interlocking tile laid over bitumen felt, with ridges and verges bedded in mortar and timber fascias and soffits along the eaves. After seventy years the felt has often dried out, the mortar has cracked, and the timber at the eaves has begun to soften. None of that is dramatic, but all of it is cheaper to put right early.

Walcot West is a private estate of mixed dates, running from the interwar years to the 1950s. A mixture of dates means a mixture of roofs: hipped and gabled, with bay windows, porches and attached garages, each with its own small roof to keep watertight. Hipped roofs have hip tiles running down each corner, and those take a lot of weathering because they meet the ridge at an awkward angle. Interwar houses often have clay or concrete tiles that have lasted well but whose pointing and flashings have not. Chimneys on semi-detached houses are commonly shared, so lead at the stack is a regular repair.

In 1958, a few years after the first houses were built, the local authority developed a small shopping centre on the estate. Parades of that kind, like the rows of lock-up garages and porches that grew up around the houses, tend to have flat or very shallow roofs rather than pitched ones. Flat roofs are a different trade from tiling. They depend on falls to the outlet, the state of the membrane and how it is dressed up against the walls. Some older garage roofs are corrugated cement sheets, which need careful handling because of the asbestos that may be in them. We identify the roof type before we quote.