Slate roofing

Here is the thing about a slate roof that nobody selling you a new one wants to explain. Good Welsh slate has a service life measured in centuries. The nails do not. The battens do not. So when a hundred-year-old slate roof starts dropping slates, the slate is almost never the problem — the roof is suffering from nail sickness, which is exactly what it sounds like: the fixings have rusted to nothing and gravity is doing the rest.

That matters because it opens up an option most people are never offered. On the right roof we can strip carefully, sort the slate on the ground, discard what has genuinely delaminated, and re-lay the sound slate on new battens and new copper or stainless nails over a breathable membrane. You keep the original material — which on a Four Oaks Edwardian or a Lichfield period property is the whole character of the building, and in a conservation area may be the only thing you are allowed to do anyway — and you get a roof that starts its clock again.

It does not always work. If the slate has delaminated, if it has been face-nailed by a previous repair, if too much has been broken by someone walking on it, or if the roof has been patched so many times that the sizes no longer match, the salvage rate drops and the sums stop making sense. We will tell you the salvage percentage honestly after we have looked, because a re-lay with sixty per cent salvage is a different job from one with ninety.

For new slate, we use genuine Welsh where the building deserves it and Spanish where budget rules. Both are real slate and both will outlive us. What we will not do is put fibre-cement slate on a period property and let you believe it is the same thing — from the pavement, at ten years old, it is not.