Egremont, where we do most of our work.

Egremont is a proper market town with a castle over it and a wide Main Street, and it is built out of the red sandstone that comes out of the ground round here. That sandstone is the thing to understand about roofs in this town: it is a soft, porous stone, it weathers, and where it meets a roof — at a chimney, at a parapet, at an abutment — it needs a lead detail that keeps water off it rather than a smear of cement that traps water against it.

The town is really three different sorts of housing. Along Main Street and the older streets you have Georgian and Victorian frontages, some of them stepped and awkward, with slate roofs and complex junctions where buildings of different heights meet. Down towards Bookwell and the older industrial end there are mining terraces of the same vintage as Cleator Moor's. Then round the edges there is a lot of post-war and 1960s to 70s estate housing with a shallower pitch and concrete tile.

Those three want three different things. The Main Street roofs are heritage work — natural slate, lead, and care about what the street looks like. The terraces are usually a straight strip and re-slate. The estate houses are more often gutters, fascias, soffits and the odd flat roof over a back extension than they are whole roofs.

Because it is two miles away, Egremont gets the same response as our own town. There is no travel loaded into a price, and coming out to look at it costs you nothing whichever end of town you are.