Roofers in Leeds

The roofs of Leeds

Leeds is a brick city with grey slate roofs, which sets it apart from the stone towns to its west. The clay south of the river gave it red brick for its enormous Victorian expansion, and the railways gave it Welsh slate to cover it. That combination is what you see across Headingley, Burley, Kirkstall, Harehills, Chapel Allerton and Armley: through terraces for the better-off, back-to-backs for everyone else, all with a stack on the party wall and slates that are now well over a century old.

The back-to-backs are the roofing job Leeds has that nowhere else does on the same scale. The type was banned nationally in 1909 but Leeds kept building them until 1937 and around 19,500 survive, more than four thousand in Harehills alone and thousands more in Beeston Hill and Holbeck. Each pair shares one roof, so a leak on one side is often a party-wall problem on both, and a re-roof needs both households to agree and a scaffold on the street. We do a lot of them and we know how to make the conversation with the neighbour easy.

Outside the Victorian ring are the council estates: Gipton from 1934, then Seacroft, Halton Moor, Belle Isle and the rest, and the post-war rebuilding that added Cottingley, Little London and more than a hundred tower blocks. The council still manages over fifty thousand homes, nearly two thirds of them built before 1964, and has just let a multi-million pound re-roofing framework to renew them. The owner-occupied houses on the same estates are the same age and need the same work. The old stone villages absorbed as suburbs, Farsley, Pudsey, Calverley and Horsforth, are the exception: hammer-dressed stone with Welsh blue slate, mostly in conservation areas.