Post-War & New Town Homes

The 1950s–70s estates are reaching re-roofing age together — get the honest verdict on yours.

Whole towns in our patch were built in a couple of decades: Coventry's post-blitz estates, steel-town Corby, the New Towns of Hemel Hempstead and Stevenage, and later Milton Keynes. Their houses share a roof: interlocking concrete tile, laid fast and priced keenly, designed for roughly fifty years. The maths is now due, street by street.

How a concrete tile roof ends

Not with a bang. The tiles go porous first — you can see it after rain, when some stay dark long after their neighbours dry — and shed their surface as grit into the gutters. The underfelt goes brittle and tears at the eaves, dropping fragments into the loft and letting wind-driven rain past the tiles. Repairs start arriving yearly instead of occasionally. None of this is failure on any given day, which is exactly why it deserves a straight, per-house verdict rather than either panic or neglect.

The honest range of outcomes

Some of these roofs have a decade of cheap, quiet service left, and we'll say so. Some are ready for replacement — new breathable membrane, treated battens, modern tiles, ventilation, dry-fixed ridges and verges, a roof genuinely better than the original. And some just need this year's small jobs: gutters coping with the grit, a dry verge where mortar has given up, a felt repair at the eaves. The evidence decides; our guide to that decision shows how.

Repair options

Repair or replace

Beware the street-wide sales pitch. Houses roofed together do age together, but not identically — orientation, trees, past repairs and luck spread the real failure dates across years. "Everyone's having it done" is marketing; your tiles, your felt and your loft are the facts. We inspect the one roof that matters and give its answer, whichever way it goes.

Our process

How we do it

On these estates we check the era's quirks alongside the roof itself: asbestos cement in garage roofs and soffits (left undisturbed and handled through licensed routes when found), early plastic underlays that fail differently from bitumen felt, and ventilation that modern insulation has quietly blocked. It's a known generation of housing with known habits — which makes it a satisfying one to get right.

Common questions

Frequently asked

What does "design life" actually mean — will the roof stop working at fifty? +

No — it means the point past which the manufacturer no longer promises the tile keeps its strength and water-shedding. Plenty of concrete roofs serve honourably into their sixties; plenty start costing real money at forty-five. Age puts you in the zone; only inspection tells you where in the zone you are.

Is grit in the gutters really a warning sign? +

It's the tile's surface washing off, so yes — it's the covering ageing in plain sight. One clean-out's worth means little; gutters that refill with grit every season mean the tiles are well into their erosion years and the roof belongs in your medium-term plans.

Can we insulate the loft before dealing with the roof? +

Yes, but leave the eaves breathing. Post-war roofs were built with air movement these houses relied on, and insulation stuffed tight to the eaves causes the condensation problems we then get called about. Insulate to the wall plate, keep the airflow path, and the two projects won't fight each other.