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.

Inland, at the foot of the Cleveland Hills, sits a different Tees Valley altogether. Stokesley and Great Ayton are Georgian and Victorian market towns rather than industrial ones, built on weaving, tanning and quarrying long before the ironworks arrived downstream, and the River Leven that runs through both of them was judged serious enough a flood risk that the Environment Agency built a dedicated diversion channel above Stokesley in 2022. It is a reminder that our Tees Valley patch runs from dockside terraces to moorland-edge market squares within a few miles.

East Cleveland, the coastal strip running from Guisborough to Loftus, made its living from ironstone rather than the blast furnaces downstream: Guisborough grew up around the ruins of its twelfth-century Augustinian priory long before mining arrived, and the villages beyond it, Skelton, Brotton and Loftus, were built almost entirely for the ironstone workings that once ran along that coast. Saltburn-by-the-Sea and Marske-by-the-Sea are a different story again, seaside resorts founded in the Victorian railway age, Saltburn's own cliff lift and pier dating to the 1860s and 70s when Henry Pease's railway first turned a fishing hamlet into a planned holiday town. Middlesbrough, Redcar and this stretch of coast were all still North Riding of Yorkshire until 1974, then briefly the county of Cleveland until that too was abolished in 1996, so today's Tees Valley Combined Authority, with its own directly elected mayor since 2017, is the third different administrative arrangement these towns have lived under in fifty years, whatever the roofs above them.