Roofers in Nottinghamshire

Roofing in Nottinghamshire

Much of Nottinghamshire's housing was built for coal. Mansfield, Hucknall, Kirkby in Ashfield, Worksop and the villages between them are full of colliery-era terraces and company housing from the 1890s through to the 1930s, built quickly, roofed in Welsh slate, and standing on ground that has been worked underneath. Historic mining settlement is still the reason for a great many distorted roof planes, leaning stacks and stubborn recurring leaks in this part of the county, and it is a structural question rather than a covering question. In the north, towards Retford and the Trent valley, clay pantiles appear in numbers and bring the usual pantile problem of mortar-bedded verges and ridges that crumble and let the wind in.

Nottingham itself is a different job again. The city grew on Sherwood Sandstone, which is soft enough that cellars and caves were cut into it by hand, and its Victorian expansion left dense terraced districts alongside the Lace Market's tall industrial buildings. Beeston, Arnold and Carlton contribute large tracts of 1930s semis with clay tile roofs and original timber fascias. Guttering is the single most commonly advertised service among the county's 168 listed firms, ahead even of repairs, which is a fair reflection of a stock where the coverings are generally holding up and the rainwater goods are the weak point.

For a homeowner here, the useful discipline is to separate symptoms from causes. A damp patch below a stack in a former pit village usually means the stack needs rebuilding rather than repointing. If your gutters overflow at the same joint every year, the fall is wrong and no amount of clearing will fix it. And if you have pantiles in the north of the county, ask about dry-fix verges rather than another round of mortar.