Tile & Slate Roofing in Wiltshire

Wiltshire has three coverings in regular use, and the right one depends on what's already up there and what the property is. Natural slate lasts longest — well past a century if it's re-battened and re-flashed along the way — but it's also the heaviest and most expensive of the three, and it's usually the correct answer where the building calls for it: period stone property, terraces around Bath, anything in a conservation area where slate is what was there originally. Clay tile is the traditional covering across much of the rest of the county; it ages well and typically outlasts concrete by decades. Concrete tile is what you'll find on most post-war estates — the cheapest to buy and fit, but the shortest-lived, and it tends to show its age through surface erosion on the exposed faces once it's twenty-odd years in.

Bath, Bradford-on-Avon and the cathedral quarter in Salisbury all have a lot of listed and conservation-area property, and on those jobs the covering usually has to match what's already there — not a similar tile, the right one. That can mean sourcing reclaimed slate or tile to blend with the original rather than reroofing wholesale in new stock. We do the roofing; whether the job needs listed building consent or what a conservation area allows is between you (or your architect) and the council — but we've worked on enough of these roofs to know what they'll expect the finished covering to look like.

What separates a tidy roof from a cheap one is in the detailing: verges finished properly rather than just bedded in mortar and left, valleys that shed water instead of holding it, ridge and hip tiles either mechanically dry-fixed or bedded and pointed depending on the roof, and lead soakers and flashings cut and dressed to the actual roof rather than a generic profile off the shelf. That's where most of the labour on a tiling job goes.