My roof was damaged in a storm — what should I do?

Evidence first, because it stops being available quickly. Photograph the damage from the ground, photograph where the material landed — in the garden, in the street, on a neighbour's car — and note the date and roughly the time. Insurers frequently check wind speeds against Met Office records for the location, and some policies define 'storm' by a threshold, so knowing what actually happened matters.

Then safety. Look up and work out whether anything is hanging over a footpath, a doorway or where cars park. A ridge tile is heavy and it is at the highest point of the building; that is a falling-object risk and it gets made safe before anything else is discussed. Keep people away from underneath it in the meantime.

Then the part people miss: what you can see is usually the smaller half. Wind does not lift a roof evenly — it gets under an edge and peels from there — so the damage clusters at the verges, the ridge and the eaves. Material that lifted and settled back, nails that drew, clips that sprang and bedding that cracked all look fine from the ground and come down in the next gale. A check after serious weather is cheap; a second emergency call-out in February is not.

On insurance, be straightforward. Storm damage is covered by most buildings policies; gradual deterioration is not, and insurers employ loss adjusters specifically to tell them apart. A claim that describes honestly what happened, with photographs from the day and a scope that separates storm damage from pre-existing wear, gets settled. One that quietly bundles in five years of neglect gets refused.

Finally, and this matters more after a storm than at any other time: nobody reputable knocks on your door. Storms bring out the doorstep trade, and the pattern never varies — a van in the street, an unprompted knock, an alarming description of something you cannot see, and pressure to agree there and then. If you did not ask them to come, they do not go on your roof.

There is a real reason storms hit harder in some parts of this patch. Exposure rises steeply with height east of the town — Kerridge Hill is 313 metres, Tegg's Nose 380, Shutlingsloe 506 — and the Met Office records substantially more air frost on the high ground than on the Cheshire plain. Frost cracks mortar bedding through the winter, and the gale then takes off what the frost had already loosened.