Roofers in Middlesbrough

The roofs of Middlesbrough

Middlesbrough is a Victorian iron town. It grew from a few hundred people to more than a hundred thousand in sixty years, and the streets it built for ironworks and railway families are grids of red-brick terraces, around eleven thousand of them still standing in the older inner area along Parliament Road, Ayresome Street, Abingdon Road, Marton Road and North Ormesby. They are roofed in the grey Welsh and Cumbrian slate that came by rail from the mid 1800s and gradually replaced the pantiles and thatch that were the Tees-side tradition before it. Linthorpe, with its wide tree-lined avenues, is the late Victorian and Edwardian villa suburb, and Albert Park, Linthorpe and the Historic Quarter are conservation areas.

Beyond the terraces are the estates. Thorntree, Berwick Hills, Pallister, Easterside and Netherfields were built after the war, Coulby Newham and Hemlington from the late 1970s, and almost all of it is concrete interlocking tile on its first covering. The Redland 49 was the tile that re-roofed Britain after the war and Middlesbrough has a great deal of it, now sixty and seventy years old. Thirteen, the housing association that owns much of the stock, is running a programme that includes hundreds of roof improvements, and the Gresham area is being rebuilt. Private owners on the same streets face the same roofs.

Exposure here is wind rather than height. Middlesbrough is low and gets less rain than the Pennine towns, around 600 millimetres, but the Tees estuary and the open coast a few miles away bring gales on five to ten days a year and one of the highest hourly wind speeds ever recorded in England was measured at South Gare. Ridges, verges and lead on the estates and the terraces are specified with that in mind. Middlesbrough was in the North Riding until 1974 and is in the ceremonial county today, but it is run as a Tees Valley authority and we do not pretend otherwise.