Roofers in Washington

Washington is fifteen minutes from our Killingworth yard, straight down the A1 and A194, and it presents a roofing question that whole streets are now asking at once: what to do when an entire estate's roofs, built together in the 1960s and 70s, reach the end of their lives together. Willow Roofing is owner-led — the man at the top has spent more than twenty-three years on the tools and still surveys, quotes and runs every job himself — and our answer starts with an honest assessment rather than a standard pitch.

We will be candid: our sixty-three MyBuilder reviews, all positive, come from elsewhere in the North East — Newcastle, North Tyneside, Gateshead and beyond — because Washington is newer ground for us. The reviews are public and worth reading, though, because they describe exactly what a Washington customer would get: written quotes, steady communication and a clean site.

Washington is really a federation of places. The old villages came first — Washington Village around its green and the Old Hall, Fatfield down by the Wear, Harraton and the other former colliery communities — with a mix of stone buildings, Victorian terraces and miners' housing whose slate and clay roofs are now well over a century old in places, and showing it.

Around and between them, the development corporation built the Washington most people know: the numbered districts of 1960s and 70s estates, laid out in closes and greens and roofed almost universally in concrete tile over bituminous felt. Those roofs were built to a fifty-year horizon and they are past it — porous tiles, brittle felt cracking at the eaves, and gardens collecting fragments of mortar after every named storm.

We have no reviewed Washington jobs yet, and we would rather tell you that plainly than let a page imply otherwise. Our nearest reviewed work is in Gateshead, one junction up the road, where a customer described his new porch roof as a fantastic job and named the whole crew in his review. Across sixty-three reviews the pattern repeats — quotes honoured, timescales kept, rubbish removed — and it holds whether the job is two slipped tiles or a full re-roof. Washington's distance from our base is a fifteen-minute run, which is to say no distance at all.

The service Washington needs most in the coming decade is the full strip and re-roof: new breathable underlay, treated battens and modern concrete or clay tiles on estate houses whose original coverings are exhausted. Alongside that sit the supporting trades — fascias, soffits and guttering renewed at the same time so the scaffold is paid for once, EPDM on the flat-roofed garages and porches the estates were built with, and solar panel removal and refit for the growing number of Washington homes with panels above a roof that now needs work. In the old villages, slate repair, leadwork and chimney repointing still have their place.