Pitched roofing — tile & slate in Macclesfield

A pitched roof is a system, and the covering is only the visible part of it. Underneath sit the battens, the underlay, the fixings and the ventilation path, and it is normally one of those that has failed rather than the slate you can see out of the bedroom window.

The coverings round here fall into three eras and they behave very differently. The silk-era terraces are Welsh slate, thin, light and good for a century or more if the nails hold. The interwar and postwar estates are mostly clay or concrete plain tiles. The 1960s and 70s housing is concrete interlocking tile, which was sold as a sixty-year product and is now, quietly, sixty years old — and it is usually the fixings and the battens that go first while the tiles themselves still look serviceable from the pavement.

That mix is unusually wide in this town. VOA council tax data puts central Macclesfield at 54.1% pre-1919 while Tytherington is 1.5% — so two roofs a mile and a half apart can want completely different work, and a quote written from a photograph of the street is not worth much.

Whatever the covering, the current standard applies. BS 5534 was revised in 2014 and mortar alone is no longer an acceptable fixing for ridges, hips or verges — all of them have to be mechanically fixed. On the high ground east of the town that is not a technicality, it is the reason your ridge is still on the roof after a February gale.