Roofers in Glasgow City

Roofing in Glasgow City

Glasgow is a tenement city, and the tenement roof is a shared object. One continuous covering, usually Scots slate on sarking with lead flashings and a run of chimney stacks along the ridge, spans an entire close and belongs in common to every flat below it. Under the Tenement (Scotland) Act 2004, repairs are a scheme decision and costs are apportioned across the flats, which means the practical first step after a leak is rarely calling a roofer. It is getting hold of the other owners or the factor. Contractors used to this city expect that, and the good ones will survey and quote for the whole roof and invoice each owner separately.

The chimney stacks deserve particular attention. A Glasgow tenement stack can carry eight or more flues, nearly all of them redundant since the fires went out, and stacks are the most exposed masonry on the building. Cracked haunching, eroded pointing, failed lead soakers and open unlined flues let water in above the roofline where it runs down inside the chimney breast and appears as damp two floors below. A great deal of what gets diagnosed as a roof leak in Glasgow is actually a stack.

The sandstone matters too, blonde in the West End around Partick and Hyndland, red in Govanhill and parts of the Southside. Both are porous, and both suffer badly when a gutter or downpipe has been discharging against them unnoticed for years.

Beyond the tenements, Knightswood and Mosspark are 1920s and 1930s garden-suburb council schemes with pitched tiled roofs of their own era, and Springburn is dominated by post-war rebuilding. Fifty-one firms serve the city and 26 of them advertise emergency cover, the highest proportion in this directory, which reflects both the rainfall and the density.