Roofers in Lichfield

Lichfield has a medieval and Georgian core, several conservation areas, and a large number of listed buildings, and roofing inside that is a genuinely different discipline from roofing an estate. The constraint is not the roof. The constraint is consent.

On a listed building, the roof covering is part of the listing. Replacing handmade clay tile with a machine-made equivalent, or Welsh slate with a fibre-cement lookalike, is an alteration — and doing it without listed building consent is a criminal offence, not a slap on the wrist. Even outside the listings, the conservation areas across the city control what you can do to a roof that is visible from the street. We work with Lichfield District Council on this and we will tell you at survey which of those three situations you are in: unlisted and unconstrained, conservation area, or listed. The honest answer changes the timeline more than it changes the price.

The material reality here is handmade clay tile and Welsh slate, both of which are still available and neither of which is cheap. Handmade clay has a slightly irregular camber and colour variation that is precisely the point — it is why an old Lichfield roof looks like an old Lichfield roof and a machine-made one does not, even from the pavement. Where a roof only needs part of a pitch doing, we will hunt reclaimed tile to match rather than put a bright new patch in the middle of a two-hundred-year-old roof.

The newer parts of the city — Boley Park, Streethay and out towards the A38 — are ordinary modern housing and we treat them as such. Not everything in Lichfield is a heritage job, and we are not going to price it as one.