Slate is the covering people are least confident pricing, partly because "slate" covers four quite different products at four quite different price points.
Slate divides into several products that get talked about as if they were one, and the price range across them is wide. Before any figure means anything, it is worth being clear about which of them a quotation refers to.
Quarried stone, split and dressed. Spanish slate is the most widely used in the UK; Welsh slate is generally regarded as the premium product and is priced accordingly. Within each there are grades, and the grade matters — thickness, consistency and the level of iron content that will show as rust staining later. A slate roof laid in good material will comfortably outlive the person who commissioned it.
Second-hand slate, salvaged from other roofs. Useful where an exact match to existing work matters. It is not automatically cheap: good reclaimed slate is in demand, it has to be sorted and graded, and every slate needs re-holing. Its remaining life is also unknown in a way that new slate's is not.
A manufactured board, consistent in size and thickness, lighter than natural slate and considerably cheaper. It lays quickly because every unit is identical. The trade-off is appearance — it lacks the depth and variation of stone — and a shorter expected service life.
A concrete or composite tile shaped to resemble slate. It is the cheapest of the four and by far the fastest to lay. At any distance it does not read as slate, and it is heavier than the material it imitates, which matters on a roof framed for stone.
| Natural slate | Reclaimed | Fibre cement | Slate-effect tile | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Material cost | Highest | High | Moderate | Lowest |
| Laying speed | Slow | Slow | Faster | Fastest |
| Weight | Moderate | Moderate | Light | Heaviest |
| Appearance | Best | Best for matching | Fair | Poor at close range |
| Service life | Very long | Unknown remainder | Shorter | Moderate |
| Consistency | Some variation | Variable | Uniform | Uniform |
This matters for cost, because it determines whether you are buying a repair or a replacement.
Slate itself is extremely durable. What fails first is almost always the fixings. Nails corrode over decades, and because every nail on the roof is the same age and sits in the same conditions, they reach the end of their life at roughly the same time. The result is slates beginning to slip in ones and twos, in different places, with no identifiable cause — a pattern known as nail fatigue.
Once nail fatigue is general, there is no repair that solves it. Refixing individual slates as they slip is a treadmill, because the ones either side are on the same clock. That is the point at which the arithmetic turns decisively towards replacement.
The other common failures are the battens the slates are nailed to, and the underlay behind them. Old bitumen felt embrittles and tears, particularly at the eaves. Once it has gone, a slipped slate is a leak rather than an inconvenience.
In some Cheshire towns the covering is effectively specified for you by heritage controls. Crewe is not one of them. Crewe is not covered by any of Cheshire East's Article 4 directions, which apply to eight conservation areas elsewhere in the borough, so permitted development rights have not been withdrawn here.
And in any case, a like-for-like re-slate does not materially affect the external appearance of the building, which means under section 55 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 it is not development at all — so no planning question arises. The exception is a listed building, where listed building consent applies separately and Cheshire East Council should be approached before work is priced.
That freedom cuts both ways. If you want to move from slate to tile, or from natural slate to fibre cement, nothing normally stops you. It is worth thinking about the street, though: on a terrace of identical slated houses, one roof in slate-effect concrete is visible from a long way off.
Re-slating renews a thermal element and engages regulation 23 of the Building Regulations 2010, which requires thermal performance to be improved where technically and economically feasible. The figure for a roof in an existing dwelling is 0.16 W/(m²K) under Approved Document L Volume 1. The work is either notified to building control or self-certified under a competent person scheme, and a certificate should follow.
We will look at the roof and the loft, tell you whether you are looking at nail fatigue or something more local, and set out what each slate option would mean for the job. If your existing slates are worth reclaiming, we will say so. If they are not, we will say that too.
We will tell you which type of slate suits the roof and the budget, and be straight about the trade-offs of each.
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Some usually can. On a strip, slates are sorted and the sound ones set aside — but expect a meaningful proportion to be unusable, and expect them all to need re-holing. Re-use is worth doing where matching an existing appearance matters. It is not generally a way of making the job much cheaper, because the sorting and handling take time.
Because the slate outlives its fixings. Nails corrode, and once they begin to fail they fail across the whole roof, since every nail is the same age and in the same conditions. This is called nail fatigue and it is the commonest reason an otherwise sound slate roof has to be renewed.
It is a different product with different strengths. It is lighter, cheaper, more consistent in size and quicker to lay, which makes it a sensible option where the structure is marginal or the budget is tight. It does not have the depth or the variation of natural slate, and its expected service life is shorter.
For a like-for-like re-slate, no — it does not materially affect the external appearance and so is not development under section 55 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Crewe is also not covered by any of Cheshire East's Article 4 directions. A listed building is a separate matter and needs listed building consent.
Apex Roofing covers Cheshire and the surrounding area for complete roof replacement, new slate and tiled roofs and re-roofing.
Apex Roofing Cheshire · 105 Fence House, Fence Avenue, Macclesfield SK10 1LM
Tell us about the property and the roof in Crewe, and we will come back to you — usually the same day.
Prefer to talk? Call 07377 461095 · WhatsApp +44 7465 861265 · Email apexroofing14@gmail.com
