Slate roofing
specialists for Glasgow's tenements, villas and period terraces.

It is the failure of the nails rather than the slate. Iron nails corrode over decades until they no longer hold, and slates start releasing a few at a time across the whole roof rather than in one spot. If you are losing slates in a different place every winter, that is what you are looking at — and no amount of patching gets ahead of it.

Usually. We source reclaimed Scotch and Welsh slate, and where reclaimed is not available in quantity we match new slate for size, thickness and colour. On a tenement close where the roofs must read as one, matching is the whole job — we will show you samples against the existing before ordering.

The slate itself can outlast several sets of fixings — Ballachulish and Welsh slate on Glasgow roofs is routinely over a century old and still sound. Realistically the covering as a system gives you 80 to 100 years when it is laid on treated battens with non-ferrous fixings.

Per square metre, no — tile is cheaper to buy and quicker to lay. Over the life of the roof, slate usually wins, and on a period property it is often the only thing that looks right. If the building was designed for slate, tile tends to look wrong and can be too heavy for the original structure.

It can. Listed building consent may be needed, and conservation areas often specify slate type and coursing. We will tell you the position before quoting and provide the specification detail planning departments ask for. What we will not do is start work and let you discover the problem afterwards.

Sometimes, and where it is genuinely the right answer we will. But partial re-slating only works if the rest of the roof has real life left and we can match what is there. If the fixings have gone across the whole roof, doing half of it just means scaffolding twice.