Roofers in Sunderland

Sunderland has some of the most distinctive housing in the North East, and it deserves roofing to match. Willow Roofing is an owner-led firm based at Killingworth, around twenty-five minutes up the A19, led on every job by the owner himself — twenty-three years on the tools and present on every roof we take on. We quote plainly, keep our dates, photograph our progress and leave the street clean behind us.

We will be honest about where we stand: our sixty-three MyBuilder reviews, every one of them positive, were earned so far in Newcastle, North Tyneside, Gateshead and Northumberland rather than in Sunderland itself. The A19 makes the city an easy reach from the yard, the crew and the pricing are identical, and there is no travel charge; we intend to earn our Wearside reviews the same way we earned the Tyneside ones.

Nothing says Sunderland like the Sunderland cottage: single-storey terraced houses built street upon street for shipyard and colliery workers, and found almost nowhere else in Britain. Millfield, Pallion, Hendon, Fulwell and Roker are full of them, under pitched slate roofs whose original fixings are now a century and more old — modest roofs, but unforgiving of poor repairs, because every slope shows from the street.

Ashbrooke offers the grander end: Victorian terraces and villas in the city's principal conservation area, with the slate roofs, ornate chimneys and leadwork that the period implies. Post-war estates such as Farringdon and Grindon carry concrete-tiled semis now reaching renewal age, and along the seafront at Roker and Seaburn, salt air and northerly weather test flashings, pointing and guttering harder than anywhere inland. The variety is unusual for one city, and it keeps a roofer honest.

We have no Sunderland reviews yet, and would sooner say so than pretend otherwise. The record we bring across the Tyne is substantial: sixty-three reviews on MyBuilder, one hundred per cent positive, including a porch re-roof in Gateshead — our nearest reviewed job to Wearside — full re-roofs on Victorian terraces and 1930s semis in Newcastle, and storm repairs handled promptly across North Tyneside. Every habit those reviews describe — itemised quotes, kept start dates, daily updates, tidy sites — travels down the A19 with us intact, and the first Sunderland jobs are the ones we most want to do well.

The cottage streets and Ashbrooke terraces keep slate work at the centre of things: repairs, re-slating and the chimney and leadwork that go with older roofs. On the post-war estates it is concrete-tile re-roofing and roofline renewal — fascias, soffits and guttering — as the original materials give out together. Coastal homes at Roker and Seaburn need particular attention to flashings, verges and gutter fixings, which salt and wind loosen first. Add EPDM flat roofing for extensions and garages, Velux windows, and solar remove-and-refit around re-roofs, and the city's whole range of housing is covered.