Roofers in York

The roofs of York

York's housing runs from the medieval and Georgian core inside the walls, timber, brick and Magnesian limestone in one of the largest conservation areas in England, to the Victorian railway terraces that grew around the station and the works at Leeman Road, Holgate, The Groves, Clementhorpe and South Bank, then the inter-war council estate at Tang Hall and the Rowntree garden village at New Earswick, and the post-war and modern suburbs of Acomb, Haxby, Huntington and Clifton. The city has 35 conservation areas and the historic core alone is divided into two dozen character areas, so like-for-like materials matter on a great many streets.

The roofs mix two traditions. The Vale of York is pink brick and clay pantile country: pantiles came from Holland in the seventeenth century, are single-lap, weigh about two thirds of a plain-tiled roof and were traditionally torched with lime underneath. The Victorian streets, Fulford Road, Holgate and the terraces off Leeman Road, are reddish brick with Welsh slate. Bootham, The Mount, Bishophill and Clifton have both on the same streets. Matching a weathered pantile or re-torching a roof properly is a skill, and the council's own advice for its roughly 7,500 homes is a full renewal of tiles, battens and felt every thirty years or so.

The weather here is not the coast's wind but the Vale's cold. York sits low and flat in the rain shadow of the Pennines, so it is drier than the west, but cold air drains into the Vale and gives it more frost and fog than the hills around it, around 55 air-frost days a year. Freeze-thaw damage to tiles, mortar, flaunching and flashings is the everyday York problem, and it shows up first on ridges, verges and chimneys.