From Miners' Rows to Sandstone Villas: Lanarkshire's Buildings and Their Roofs

Every Lanarkshire street tells you what its roof needs, if you know how to read it.

Lanarkshire's housing is a history of its industry. The weaving villages left low stone cottages. The coal and iron years built the miners' rows and the sandstone terraces, then filled the county towns with Victorian villas and tenements for managers and merchants. Steel built Motherwell and Wishaw's streets. The twentieth century added interwar bungalows, vast council programmes and the new towns.

Each generation roofed differently. The Victorian stock carries Scotch slate over sarking boards, with big chimneys, skews at every gable and lead where roofs meet stone. The interwar years brought clay tiles. The post-war schemes standardised on concrete tiles and felt flat roofs, materials with shorter lives that are now on their second or third renewal.

The stone matters too. Much of the county is built in local sandstone, blonde and red, which is handsome and porous. Sandstone chimneys and skews drink water; frost then breaks the mortar joints from within. This is why chimney pointing is the most common repair in the county, and why it is worth doing properly in the right mix rather than smearing hard cement over the problem, which traps moisture and makes it worse.

Knowing the building type tells a roofer most of the diagnosis before the ladder goes up: nail sickness on the Victorian terrace, brittle clay on the 1930s bungalow, tired concrete tiles on the scheme semi, and a flat garage roof at the end of its felt. That local knowledge is what CB Roofing has built over decades working these streets.

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