Roofers in Walmley

The estates that make up most of Walmley went up in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were built with the material of the moment: concrete interlocking tile, usually Marley or Redland, laid on shallow pitches at speed. It is not a bad roof. It is a roof with a design life, and a lot of Walmley is now at the far end of it.

Concrete tile does not fail the way slate fails. Slate goes because the nails go; the slate itself is fine. Concrete goes because the tile itself degrades — the surface spalls, it gets porous, it starts holding water, and it gets heavier and more brittle as it does. On a shallow pitch, where wind can drive rain back up under the laps, a porous tile and a perished underlay together will let water through even though nothing looks broken from the ground. When someone in Walmley tells us the roof looks fine but the loft is damp, this is usually why.

The underlay is the part nobody sees and it is often the actual culprit. The bitumen felt used on these estates has a shorter life than the tiles above it. Fifty years on it is brittle, torn at the eaves where it has been flapping in the wind, and no longer doing the job it was there to do. That cannot be fixed from outside. It means a strip.

The other Walmley constant is flat roofs — garages, porches, and the flat-roofed dormers that a lot of these houses had added in the 1980s. The original three-layer felt on those is long finished. This is the one part of Walmley roofing where the modern material is genuinely and unarguably better: a fibreglass or EPDM covering will outlast the felt it replaces several times over, and it is not a close call.