Roofing in Newmarket

Newmarket is a Suffolk town on a Cambridge postcode, and CB8 is the reason people here are regularly told they are outside somebody's area. They are not outside ours.

The streets behind the High Street are dense Victorian terrace built for the racing industry, and on a lot of them the roof runs on as one plane across four or five houses with nothing at the party wall to mark where one ends. Repairing a slope like that is as much about establishing what is yours as it is about the slates, and it is worth getting right before the work starts rather than after a neighbour asks. We cover CB8 and the villages around the Heath, where the ground is open and takes the wind properly.

Built by racing

James I first came to Newmarket in 1605, and Charles II commissioned a palace here in 1668. A fire in 1683 destroyed houses, shops and stables on the north side of the High Street. The railway reached the town in 1848, and in the late Victorian and Edwardian years the training yards and studs spread out along Bury Road onto the open heath.

West Suffolk Council's draft appraisals of the town show what that left on the roofs. The trainers' houses on Bury Road and Moulton Road are largely gault brick under hipped slate, with clay plain tile on some later buildings. The Newmarket Conservation Area was designated in 1996 and revised in 2009, so work on the older houses, and on the front slopes of the terraces inside it, starts with a check on consent.

Slate on a shared roof

Most of the slate in the terraces is Victorian, and on roofs of that age it is usually the nails that fail rather than the slate. A slate slips, then another, and a line of them sliding out of a slope is the classic sign. Sound slates can be refixed. When a whole slope is going that way, stripping it and re-slating with new nails and underlay, reusing good slate where we can, is the better job.

On a shared plane the junction with next door matters as much as the slates. Establishing where the party wall sits under the roof, and so what is yours, is worth getting right before the work starts rather than after a neighbour asks.

Where to go next in Newmarket

Our slate roofing page covers refixing and re-slating, and our article on how long a slate re-roof takes helps with planning around it. For leaks and storm damage, see roof repairs, and for tall terrace stacks, chimney repairs. We also cover Bury St Edmunds along the A14.