Areas We Cover

Why the town changes the job

A roof is a roof, but what usually goes wrong with one depends a good deal on where it is and when it was built. On the coast, at Christchurch and the exposed side of Poole, salt-laden wind is hard on the metal in a roof rather than on the tiles. Nails corrode, clips let go, and mortar gets stripped out of ridge joints. Roofs there tend to need attention at the details long before the covering itself has anything wrong with it. Inland at Ferndown and Wimborne there is no salt and much less wind, and the problems change accordingly. Ferndown filled out in one mid-century wave, so whole roads of concrete tile reach the end of their life together. Wimborne has a medieval core with 164 listed buildings in the conservation area, which is work we do not take on at all. Bournemouth is both. Victorian slate in the older roads, failing at the nails rather than the slate, and post-war tile in the suburbs failing across the whole covering at once. Further west and south the pattern just repeats itself. Weymouth and Swanage are coastal and take the same salt-driven punishment as Christchurch, with less shelter than either. Dorchester is inland and dry, much like Ferndown. What actually changes out there is the distance rather than the roofs, so each of those three pages says plainly what that means for the kind of job worth calling us for.

• Coastal towns: details fail first, so repairs are more common than replacements
• Inland towns: whole roofs age together, so replacement is more often genuine
• We will tell you which of those yours is rather than assuming
• The towns further out: the same roofs, but the travel decides which jobs make sense