Roofers in Torfaen

Roofing in Torfaen

No county in Wales packs a wider spread of building ages into a shorter distance than Torfaen. Blaenavon at the head of the valley is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its ironworks and workers' housing preserved as one of the best surviving records of the industrial revolution anywhere. Pontypool below it is a Victorian and Georgian market and ironworking town. Cwmbran, seven miles further south, was designated a New Town in 1949 and built almost entirely between then and the early 1970s. Three eras, three completely different sets of roofing problems, inside one small local authority.

The Cwmbran stock is the one most likely to affect readers, simply because there is so much of it. New Town housing was built to a modern-for-its-time formula: shallow roof pitches, concrete interlocking tiles, thin softwood roof timbers, bitumen felt underlay and a generous helping of flat-roofed garages, canopies and rear additions. Sixty-odd years on, the felt has gone brittle and tears at the eaves, mortar-bedded ridges have cracked, and the flat roofs have been recovered once or twice already. Low-pitch concrete tiles are also unforgiving of wind-driven rain, so the underlay matters far more here than on a steep slate roof.

Up in Pontypool and Blaenavon it is the opposite problem: steep slate roofs on stone buildings, many listed or in conservation areas, where the constraint is matching materials and getting consent rather than choosing them.

Whichever end of the county you are in, ask a prospective roofer which era of housing they mostly work on. A firm that spends its weeks on New Town estates and one that works on Blaenavon stone cottages are doing genuinely different trades. Eighteen firms are listed locally with a strong 4.8 average across 433 reviews.