Slate roofing in Lichfield

Slate work in Lichfield starts with a question that has nothing to do with roofing: what is the status of the building? Unlisted and unconstrained, in a conservation area, or listed. Those three answers lead to three genuinely different jobs, and getting the answer wrong is not a small mistake. On a listed building the roof covering is part of the listing, and replacing it with something else without listed building consent is a criminal offence rather than a telling-off.

Inside the older core — around the Close, Beacon Street, Dam Street and the streets running off them — most of what we touch is either handmade clay tile or Welsh slate, and both are still available and neither is cheap. Where a roof only needs part of a pitch doing, we hunt reclaimed to match rather than dropping a bright new patch into the middle of a two-hundred-year-old roof, because the patch will be the only thing anyone sees for the next thirty years.

The good news is the same as everywhere else slate is old: the slate is usually fine. Lichfield roofs of this age fail through nail sickness, not through the material giving up. That means a careful strip, sorting on the ground, and re-laying your own slate on new battens and copper nails — which happens to be exactly what a conservation officer wants to hear, because the building keeps its own face. On a listed roof it may be the only proposal that gets through at all.

We deal with Lichfield District Council on this regularly. We will tell you at survey which of the three situations you are in and what it means for your timeline, because consent is measured in weeks and it is better built into the programme than discovered halfway through it. And not all of Lichfield is a heritage job — Boley Park and Streethay are ordinary modern housing, and we are not going to price them as though they are not.