Bradford district · callouts 7 days0113 460 1042
Quote on paper Insured £5m 10-year guarantee Drone surveys
Roofers for Thornton, run out of Bradford. We tell you whether the roof wants a repair or replacing, and we show you the photographs the answer came from.
A stone village on a ridge west of Bradford with a conservation-area centre, a Bronte connection and a viaduct across the valley below. Thornton is barely out of the city centre, so surveys and small jobs there get slotted in around bigger work on the same side of Bradford. The same short list of faults keeps coming back on Thornton roofs, and the useful part of a survey is knowing which of them is a morning's work and which means the covering has finally had its day.
Off, re-battened, breathable membrane, then a covering that suits the street. Stone slate, Welsh slate, clay or concrete.
What this covers →GRP, EPDM and torch-on felt over back extensions, dormers, mill outriggers and garages, laid to a fall that clears itself.
What this covers →Heavy gritstone slate on the old terraces, Welsh slate on the villas, tile on the estates. Matched, coursed and mechanically fixed.
What this covers →Soot-black gritstone stacks repointed in lime, rebuilt, re-flaunched, re-flashed. Take-downs below the slate line as well.
What this covers →Rotten boards stripped out, UPVC or timber in, eaves ventilation kept open, done while the gutter work is on the same scaffold.
What this covers →Storm damage and live leaks made safe across Bradford, the Aire valley and the Worth valley, callouts seven days a week.
What this covers →Thornton runs along a ridge west of Bradford with the valley and the viaduct below it, and its centre is a conservation area of gritstone buildings, some listed, with the Bronte birthplace on Market Street and the Old Bell Chapel ruins up the hill. The old property is heavy Yorkshire stone slate on steep, narrow streets. Around and below that core there are Victorian and mill-era terraces, inter-war housing and post-war estates on tile. Work in the protected part has to match what is there, in stone, in lead and in mortar, and that is a different quote from re-tiling a semi.
Access is the practical difficulty. Kipping Lane and the streets off Market Street are tight, steeply pitched and parked solid, and several of the older buildings have no rear access at all. Scaffolding a three-storey stone house on a gradient takes longer to set and often needs a licence and a pedestrian route arranging. We would rather work all that out on the survey and put it in the written quote than turn up with a wagon that cannot get near the job. On bigger jobs we agree timings with neighbours, because on a street like that a scaffold affects more than one household.
For weather, Thornton is on the ridge and takes it from the west across the valley, so exposure is high even though the village feels sheltered when you are standing in the middle of it. Gable ends, stacks standing proud above steep roof lines and long unbroken ridges are the vulnerable details. Below the village the ground falls away sharply and the old railway line, now a trail, follows the valley; property down that side is damper and shadier and the moss and gutter problems are worse there. It is a small village with two quite different sets of roof conditions in it.
We do a lot of stone and conservation work on this side of the city, and Thornton is close enough to be regular ground rather than an occasional trip. The survey is free and comes with photographs, taken from the air where a stone roof is too brittle to walk. The written quote names the reclaimed slate, the lead and the lime mortar, and it includes the access and scaffold properly. Stone slate re-laying, slate and tile repairs, chimney rebuilds, lead valleys and soakers, gutters and flat roofs. Insured to five million pounds with ten years of written cover on the workmanship.
Stone houses around Thornton carry heavy gritstone or Welsh slate on timbers that have held it for well over a century. What comes round again and again is slates split and crept after a hard frost, ridges bedded in cement that has cracked along the run, and lead torn at the fold where it was always going to go.
Big period property in Thornton, whether still one household or now cut into three flats, wants a proper scaffold and somebody comfortable on old slate. Like-for-like slating, stacks rebuilt where they have opened up, and the dormers and bay tops put right on the same visit.
On protected property in Thornton we repair before we replace. Every sound slate goes back on, the shortfall is made up in reclaimed stock of the same size and thickness, and the lead is dressed properly instead of being buried in mastic.
The terraced rows in Thornton share a good deal more than a wall. The stack usually straddles the party line, and on the older streets the gutter runs the length of several houses, which is why a fault three doors down turns up in your back bedroom. We would rather see the whole run than one roof in isolation.
The ground we cover in Thornton is Market Street, Kipping Lane and Thornton Road, and the closes, folds and ginnels off it as well.
Most of that list starts cheap and turns expensive. Ring 0113 460 1042 or book the survey while it is still the cheap version.
If you are right on the edge of Thornton, the neighbouring pages are Clayton (BD14), roofers in Allerton, Denholme, Sandy Lane (BD15), Girlington and Queensbury — and then every other area across the Bradford district and Leeds.
The Bradford district, worked from Bradford — a few minutes out.
Phone or put the form in, whichever is easier. Free survey, written quote and a ten-year guarantee, the same across the whole of BD13.