Tiled Roofs

Clay and concrete — Britain's most common roofs, explained.

Most British houses wear tile. Clay — fired earth, the traditional material — holds its colour permanently and routinely passes sixty years; you'll find it on period houses in plain tiles and pantiles. Concrete — the post-war workhorse — is strong, consistent and economical, dominating everything built since the 1950s, with a working life of forty to fifty years.

Tiles fail in recognisable ways. Clay's enemy is frost: a hard winter finds any tile that has begun absorbing water and spalls its face off. Concrete's is surface wear: the pigmented face erodes over decades, the tile grows porous, holds moss and moisture, and gets heavier and weaker in step. Both suffer with their fixings — nibs snap, nails corrode, mortar bedding at ridges and verges cracks — and both are only as good as the felt beneath them.

The useful skill for an owner is reading the difference between incidents and trends: a cracked tile after a storm is an incident; a scatter of new slips and spalls every winter is a trend, and trends are what inspections are for.

Benefits

Why choose Tiled Roofs

Economical, robust and universally repairable
Clay: permanent colour, 60+ year life
Concrete: strength and value, 40–50 year life
Huge profile range — most tiles are matchable
Repairs possible tile-by-tile at modest cost

Features

What's included

Plain tiles, pantiles and interlocking profiles
Frost-spall and delamination assessment
Matching and reclaimed tile sourcing
Moss management without destructive washing
Ridge, verge and valley detailing

Typical lifespan

40–60+ years

Repair options

Repair or replace

Individual damage: replace the tiles, match as closely as possible, check the felt through the gap while it's open. Trend damage — spalling or slipping across the roof — is the covering ageing out, and the honest options are planned re-roofing now or a managed decline with annual patching; we'll price both without pushing either. Moss deserves a mention: heavy growth holds water against ageing tiles and accelerates frost damage — see moss on your roof before anyone pressure-washes it.

Common questions

Frequently asked

How do I tell clay tiles from concrete? +

Age and colour are the clues: clay keeps a rich terracotta (or its glazed colour) for life and often shows on pre-war houses; concrete fades and greys as its surface pigment wears, and dominates post-1950s builds. Broken-edge colour settles it — clay is the same colour through, concrete shows a grey core.

My concrete tiles look faded and mossy — do they need replacing? +

Not necessarily. Fading is cosmetic; the questions that matter are porosity, spalling and fixings. A faded 30-year-old concrete roof may have 15 sound years left. What faded, mossy tiles do mean is: worth a proper look, and emphatically not worth painting or coating — roof coatings are cosmetic products sold as restorations.

Should tiles be re-bedded or re-pointed? +

Only the mortared parts — ridges, hips and verges — involve mortar; the field of the roof hangs dry on battens. So "your whole roof needs repointing" is a phrase to treat with suspicion. Ridge and verge mortar does fail, and mechanical dry-fix alternatives now do those jobs without mortar at all.