Slate & Tile Roofing in Royal Wootton Bassett

Slate is a hundred-year material hung on fixings that rarely last half that. When a Welsh slate roof starts shedding, the slate is almost never the problem — the nails have corroded and the slate has simply let go. That is why slate roofs tend to fail gradually and then all at once, and why a roof shedding one slate a month is a roof approaching a decision.

Individual slates are re-hung with a copper or stainless tingle, a thin strip bent over the slate's lower edge to hold it. Done properly it is invisible from the ground and lasts. Done with lead offcuts and enthusiasm it drops the slate again within two winters. On a roof where tingles are already visible in numbers, patching further is throwing money at a roof that has told you what it needs.

The small handmade clay tiles on the older High Street properties are double-lapped, nib-hung and often four hundred to the square metre. They weather beautifully and they are unforgiving of poor matching — a modern machine-made clay tile set into a hand-made roof reads as a patch from across the street, because the colour is uniform and the camber is regular where the originals are neither.

Sourcing is the real work on these roofs. Reclaimed tiles of the right size and period, or a hand-made equivalent from a specialist producer, cost more and take longer to arrive than anything off a merchant's shelf. Where a roof needs a significant area replacing, the usual answer is to rob sound original tiles from a hidden elevation to make the visible face perfect, and put the new tiles round the back where nobody stands.

The workhorse covering of the town's post-war expansion. Interlockers are large, quick to lay and cheap per square metre, and they are the reason so many roofs here look sound from the pavement while the underlay beneath them has gone. They also absorb water as they age, and a saturated concrete tile weighs meaningfully more than a dry one — a factor on roofs whose structure was designed to the minimum of its day.

Individual replacement is straightforward while the range is still made. Once a pattern is discontinued, and many 1970s profiles are, matching becomes a salvage exercise and the argument for re-covering the whole slope strengthens considerably.

Anyone quoting to re-bed your ridge tiles in sand and cement alone on a new roof is quoting for work that no longer meets the standard. The 2014 revision of BS 5534 removed mortar as a sole fixing for ridge, hip and verge, and required mechanical fixing — clips, screws, or dry-fix systems that hold the tile whatever the mortar does.

The reasoning is exposure, and Royal Wootton Bassett has plenty of it. The town sits high on the Wiltshire clay vale with very little between it and the prevailing south-westerlies, and the newer estates on the western edge take the full force of it. Mortar shrinks and splits; rain finds the split; a hard frost levers it wider still, and one January a ridge tile leaves the roof entirely. A mechanically fixed ridge does not care what the mortar is doing.

Access dictates a great deal of this. Anything reachable from a scaffold tower prices very differently from work needing a full scaffold or a roof edge protection system.