Roofers in Hull

The roofs of Hull

Hull is a flat, low-lying port city where around ninety per cent of the ground sits below the high-tide line, and its roofs reflect three centuries of building on it. The predominant traditional roof coverings in the Old Town are clay pantiles and Welsh slate: pantiles replaced flat clay tiles after about 1700 and Welsh slate arrived by the end of the 1700s. The Avenues, a conservation area since 1974, are high-status Victorian houses under natural slate or plain clay Rosemary tiles with tall corbelled chimneys as a defining feature, and Garden Village, funded by Sir James Reckitt from 1908, is brick and pebble-dash under steep pitched roofs.

The bulk of the pre-war city was dense terraces built for the docks and the fishing fleet off Hessle Road and Holderness Road, some at sixty houses to the acre. Bombing destroyed more than five thousand homes and the council then built around 35,000, housing almost half the city by 1981: Orchard Park with its No Fines concrete terraces and towers, Bransholme with its prefabricated terraces planned for 26,000 people, and the estates around them. In Sutton village the appraisal notes how many buildings have been re-roofed in interlocking concrete tile, which is true of the whole city. The council is tendering a fresh round of pitched and flat re-roofing on its own homes from 2026.

Water is Hull's problem and roofs are part of the answer. The 2007 downpour flooded around 8,800 homes and the 2013 tidal surge came over the banks, so gutters, outlets and downpipes that take rainwater cleanly to a drain matter as much here as the covering, and flat roofs on the post-war blocks and extensions need real falls. Twenty-seven conservation areas, from the Old Town and the Georgian New Town to Hessle Road and Sutton, mean like-for-like materials on a lot of streets.