Roofers in Falkirk

Roofing in Falkirk

Falkirk sits on the Central Coalfield with the Forth estuary on one side and the Ochils in view on the other, and its roofs carry the marks of an industrial past. The Carron Company cast ironwork that ended up on buildings the length of the country, and there is still a great deal of original cast-iron rainwater goods on the Victorian sandstone terraces here. It is worth keeping. Cast iron outlasts almost anything modern if it is scraped, primed and painted on a cycle, and swapping it for plastic on a period frontage is a downgrade that shows from the street.

Grangemouth adds a factor few other Scottish towns have to weigh. Decades of estuarine and industrial air have been hard on exposed metalwork, mortar and paint finishes, and roofs on that side of the district tend to need their flashings, valleys and fixings inspected more often than the same house would inland. Bo'ness has a different problem again: a steep slope down to the Forth, a conservation area core, and a lot of tight-access frontages where the scaffolding costs more than the tiles.

Then there are the interwar and post-war estates at Denny, Bonnybridge and Stenhousemuir, where re-roofing in concrete interlocking tile was widespread and much of that work is now forty or fifty years old. Fourteen of the 37 firms listed across Falkirk advertise roof repairs and twelve list guttering, which fits a district with a lot of mid-life housing. If your property sits over historic shallow workings, and a good deal of Falkirk does, mention it: movement at a ridge or in a valley is not always a roofing fault.