A hundred years of lead, stone slate and hot mixed lime in York and the North Riding. If we have done our job you will never think about your roof again, which is a difficult thing to advertise. So here is the drawing board instead.
The work
Milled lead to code 7 and code 8, wood cored rolls, welted seams, and bays sized so the metal can move as much as it wants to. Lead almost never fails because it was thin. It fails because somebody fixed it at both ends and the sun did the rest.
Collyweston, Elterwater and Westmorland green, graded on the ground into diminishing courses before a single slate goes up the ladder. We keep a yard of reclaimed slate because there is no such thing as a new hundred year old roof.
Hair lime torching under the slates, hot mixed on site in a bath, not bought in a tub. It lets the roof breathe and it is a large part of why the building is still standing. Cement did a great deal of damage to York in the nineteen sixties.
Grade I and Grade II star work under a conservation officer, with a method statement, a full photographic record and a programme we hold to. In a hundred years we have not had a scheme refused, and we would rather like to keep it that way.
Method
I
Independent scaffold with a temporary roof over it, because a stripped roof and a Yorkshire October are a poor combination. We strip by hand into barrows. Nothing is thrown.
II
Every course is measured and photographed before it comes off, so the roof goes back the way the original roofer meant it. Slates are sorted into sizes on the ground and the sound ones are set aside for reuse.
III
With the roof open we can finally see the truth about the timbers. Rot gets cut out and spliced with matching oak or pine, scarfed and pegged rather than bolted, and we show you every repair before it is covered.
IV
Battens, torching, then slates from the eaves up, gauged off a storey rod so the courses stay honest. Lead goes in as the work rises rather than at the end, which is the only way to get the soakers right.
V
Scaffold down, gutters cleared and tested with a hose, and a bound record of the work with photographs of everything now hidden. The next roofer here will be glad of it, even if that is in 2085.
Archive
2025
Nave and chancel recovered in reclaimed Westmorland green off a roof in Kendal. Four point two tonnes of code 7 lead to the valleys and both parapet gutters. Grade I, sixteen weeks.
2023
Complete relead of the main roof and the two parapet gutters. The lead we took off was laid in 1961 in bays twice the length they should have been, and it had split at every fixed roll.
2021
Grade II. Pantile stripped, an oak purlin scarfed over four metres, and the roof relaid with sixty percent of the original tile. The rest came out of our own stock.
2019
One terrace, one contract, one scaffold run. Welsh slate throughout and every chimney repointed in hot lime. The residents' association still sends a card at Christmas.
2014
Stone slate roof rebuilt from a measured survey of the original courses after a well meaning repair in 1998 had laid it all in one size. Now in its second decade with no call backs.
Registered with the Lead Contractors Association. National Federation of Roofing Contractors, heritage register. CHAS accredited. Our leadwork carries a twenty five year guarantee, which is longer than several of us intend to keep working.
Contact
We survey across York, Ryedale, Selby and the Wolds, and further for a listed building. Tell us the grade if you know it and we will bring the paperwork with us. If water is coming in today, ring rather than write.