Roofers in Ashington

Ashington was once called the biggest mining village in the world, and the houses built for its miners still define the town: long, disciplined rows of terraces under long, disciplined runs of slate. Roofs like these reward a roofer who respects how they were built, and that is the trade our owner has practised for more than twenty-three years. He surveys every Ashington job himself and leads the work on the roof, not from an office.

We come to the town often from our base in Killingworth, half an hour south, and our Ashington reviews cover the full spread of what a roofing firm should be willing to do — a complete re-slate of a house front and back, a lead flashing repair, even a shed roof. Every one of our sixty-three MyBuilder reviews is positive, and the Ashington ones read like the rest: on time, no fuss, done properly.

The colliery rows are Ashington's signature. Built in their hundreds around the turn of the last century for the pit's workforce, they run in long parallel streets with back lanes between, and their slate roofs form some of the longest unbroken rooflines in Northumberland. A century on, the common ailments are slipped slates, nail sickness — where the original iron nails rust through and slates begin to slide in numbers — and chimney stacks and mortar ridges in need of attention.

Around the rows, the twentieth century added extensive council-built estates and, more recently, modern developments as the town has grown beyond its mining past, with Woodhorn's pit wheels now standing over a museum rather than a working colliery. Those later houses bring concrete-tiled roofs now reaching middle age, along with the usual run of fascias, gutters and flat-roofed garages.

The centrepiece of our Ashington record is a full re-slate: main roof renewed front and back, and a leaking garage roof stripped and rebuilt in timber for the same customer, who wrote that everything promised was done, done to a high standard, with the team arriving on time each day and working with no fuss and minimum disruption. Another Ashington customer called our lead flashing repair excellent and said she would hire us again without hesitation. A third had us repair a shed roof, and was very happy with the result. Big or small, the town gets the same standard.

Re-slating leads the work in Ashington, because the colliery rows are reaching the age where nail sickness makes repairs a losing game and a proper strip and re-slate becomes the sensible spend. Alongside it sit the trades those terraces depend on: leadwork and flashings, chimney repairs and repointing, and re-bedded or dry-fixed ridges. The later estates bring tile repairs, fascia, soffit and guttering renewal, and flat-roof replacements in EPDM or GRP on garages and outbuildings — a mix we cover completely in Ashington, as the range of our reviews here already shows.