Leadwork in Blackpool

Most roof leaks are leadwork failures

Slates and tiles shed water. Lead is what handles every place where the covering has to stop — a chimney coming through the slope, a valley between two pitches, an abutment against a taller neighbour, the top of a bay window, the junction where a flat roof meets a wall. Those junctions are where the water is concentrated and where movement happens, so they are where roofs leak.

They are also where the shortcuts live. Lead that is too thin for the detail, sheets run too long so they tear as they expand, cement fillets used instead of a proper chase and wedge, and flashings that were dressed once and never re-dressed. On a sheltered inland roof a poor detail can survive for years. On a west-facing Blackpool roof, with the Met Office recording five to ten gale days a year on the North West coast against fewer than five inland, it gets found out.

What we do

Doing it to code

Lead moves. It expands and contracts more than the things around it, so a sheet that is too long or fixed too rigidly will tear itself along a fold in a few seasons regardless of how neat it looked on the day. The craft is in choosing the right code of lead for the detail, keeping each piece within its proper length, allowing it to move at the laps, and fixing and dressing it so wind cannot get under an edge and start lifting.

None of that is visible from the ground when the job is finished, which is exactly why it gets skipped. We would rather explain what we are doing while we do it, and we are happy to photograph the detail before it is covered so you can see what you paid for.

Lead on period and protected buildings

A good deal of Blackpool’s leadwork sits on buildings the council takes an interest in. The borough has seven conservation areas and 47 listed buildings, of which Blackpool Tower is the only Grade I. In a conservation area, replacing a roof covering needs planning permission, and in the Raikes Hall area the Article 4 direction in force since 1 June 2020 also removes permitted development rights for roof alterations, rooflights and chimney or flue work.

Chimneys are worth a particular note. Blackpool’s conservation guidance says chimneys often make a major contribution to the character of a conservation area and should be repaired and retained, and that planning permission is required to remove one — which needs strong justification. A leaking chimney is a leadwork job far more often than it is a demolition job, and taking the stack off is not the cheap fix it appears to be once permission is factored in.

For a sense of the scale this work reaches locally: the Grand Theatre’s 2024–25 restoration involved replacing large areas of slate and lead across roughly two acres of roof, along with repairs to its Victorian cast iron rainwater goods. Domestic leadwork is a smaller version of the same discipline.

Fixings on the coast

Structural warranty guidance for coastal sites treats the first 500 metres from the shoreline as needing specific evidence of durability and weathertightness, and the band out to 5 kilometres as needing demonstrated corrosion protection. We specify fixings and ancillary metalwork with that in mind. What we will not do is quote you a corrosion category or a distance at which salt stops mattering, because no authority publishes one for this coast and anyone who gives you a number has made it up.

Your guarantee

Leadwork we carry out is covered by our 20 year full written company guarantee on all workmanship and all materials.