Roofers in Canterbury

The historic centre is its own discipline. Listed buildings, conservation areas and planning constraints mean you can't simply put back whatever is cheapest — what comes off usually has to be matched with something equivalent, and sometimes the original materials are salvaged and re-laid. Kent peg tiles are common on the older buildings, hung on oak pegs exactly as they have been for hundreds of years, and they need someone who has handled them before.

Roof structures in the old city tend to be steep, irregular and full of junctions — valleys, hips, dormers and additions built across several centuries. Very little of it is square. The leaks are almost always at the junctions rather than in the middle of a slope.

Out in the villages you get a wider mix: brick and flint cottages with clay tile, Victorian and Edwardian houses, farm buildings, and modern estates on the city edge with concrete tiles and standard trusses.

Being inland changes what fails. There's far less salt corrosion than we see in Thanet, but a great deal more tree cover — which means leaf-blocked gutters and valleys, moss growth holding damp against the tiles, and overhanging branches lifting and cracking them in high wind. Gutter and valley maintenance matters more here than almost anywhere else we work.

Our project at Barham, just outside Canterbury, used reclaimed Welsh slate — a material with a long history in this country and a very different character to the Spanish slate we fit more often on the coast.

Working with historical slate means accepting that no two pieces are identical. Sorting, grading and laying it so the finished roof is even takes considerably longer than laying new, and there is no rushing it. The reward is a roof that looks like it belongs on the building rather than something that was bolted on last year.

It also makes sense environmentally. Reclaimed slate that has already lasted a century will comfortably last another.