Roofers in Staffordshire

Roofing in Staffordshire

The blue plain tile that covers so much of Staffordshire is a local product in the truest sense: it comes from Etruria marl, the same clay that made Staffordshire blue engineering brick and made the Potteries an industrial name. Across Stoke-on-Trent, Newcastle-under-Lyme and the towns around them, streets of terraced housing carry that dark tile in enormous numbers, alongside Welsh slate on the better Victorian stock. Blue tiles are dense and durable, but they are also small, heavy and laid in huge quantities, so a re-roof involves a lot of units and a lot of nail holes, and matching salvage on a patch repair matters more than it does with a modern interlocking tile.

The county's northern edge is a different climate. Leek, Biddulph and the Staffordshire Moorlands sit on the Pennine fringe with gritstone walls, stone slate roofs and real freeze-thaw, and roofs there fail from the ridge and the mortar rather than from the field of the slope. Lichfield brings cathedral-city conservation constraints, Tamworth and Burton upon Trent bring Victorian and interwar stock in quantity, and Cannock adds post-war estates on former coalfield ground. The 177 firms listed across Staffordshire average 4.8 from more than 4,500 reviews, which is one of the stronger pictures in the Midlands.

Two pieces of practical advice. First, if you have blue plain tiles, do not let anyone talk you into a mixed repair with a modern equivalent unless you have seen the two side by side on a roof, because the colour and the texture never quite agree. Second, if you are in the Moorlands, book work for late spring or summer rather than autumn; mortar bedding laid into a wet, cold October rarely lasts, and the hills give you a much shorter reliable window than the south of the county does.