Roofers across Teesside and the Tees Valley

The roofs of Teesside and the Tees Valley

Teesside is a Victorian iron and steel district. Middlesbrough 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 roofed in the grey Welsh and Cumbrian slate that the railways brought from the mid 1800s, replacing the pantiles and thatch that came before. Redcar's Coatham and Linthorpe in Middlesbrough are the villa suburbs of the same era. Dormanstown, begun in 1917 for Dorman Long steelworkers, is a garden village with steel-framed houses.

After the war the councils built big: Thorntree, Berwick Hills, Netherfields, Easterside and Pallister in Middlesbrough, the Lakes Estate at Redcar, then Coulby Newham and Hemlington from the 1970s, and across the river Ingleby Barwick, once said to be the largest private estate in Europe. Nearly all of it is concrete interlocking tile on its first covering, and the housing associations that now own much of it are running roof improvement programmes because those roofs have reached their age.

Exposure here is wind rather than height. The Tees estuary and the open coast at Redcar bring gales on five to ten days a year, blown sand and salt, and one of the highest hourly wind speeds ever recorded in England was measured at South Gare. We treat coastal fixings, ridges and leadwork accordingly.