Professional Roof Cleaning in Bacup

The far end of the valley, and still a local job

We work out of Haslingden, which is the other end of the Rossendale valley. That is a short run up the floor of the valley rather than a trip, and it means Stacksteads, Britannia, Weir and Sharneyford are all inside a normal working day with no travel charge. It also means we can come and look at the roof rather than price it off a photograph you have sent.

A mill town that kept its roofs

Historic England has called Bacup the best-preserved cotton mill town in England, and the council’s own description of the town centre is weavers’ cottages, large stone-built mills, civic buildings and streets of compact terraced houses. That is not a tourist line, it is a description of the roofs we work on. Weavers’ cottages and mill-era terraces mean natural slate on old timbers, stone ridges bedded in lime mortar, and in places roof pitches that have not been touched since they were laid. Those roofs clean up beautifully and they punish the wrong method.

Conservation area streets and what they rule out

Bacup Town Centre is a conservation area with 20 listed buildings, and Historic England’s at-risk register currently rates its condition as very bad with an improving trend. Cleaning a roof does not need consent, but on streets like that the method matters more than anywhere else we work. High pressure strips the face off old slate, blows out lime-bedded ridge mortar and forces water under the laps. We steam and soft wash at low pressure, and if the ridge has already gone we tell you instead of washing over it.

Hillside estates are a different job to the terraces

Bacup’s pattern is the original terraces along the main roads with council estates behind them on the hillsides. The two need different handling. The terraces are slate on old battens and a shared gutter run. The estates are mostly concrete interlocking tile, which is a softer, more porous surface that loses its face if anyone takes a pressure washer to it. On concrete we drop the pressure right down and let the biocide do the work.

Why a scrape on its own is money wasted

Someone comes with a scraper, charges a couple of hundred, and the roof looks sound for a season. Then it comes back worse. Scraping takes off what you can see and leaves the spores and the root in the surface of the slate or tile. This high up the valley an untreated roof is green again inside two seasons. The treatment is the part that buys the years, which is why every roof we do gets a DDAC biocide across the whole surface and carries a 2-year no-moss guarantee.

Everything is fixed price and written down before we start. See roof cleaning for the full method, gutter cleaning if the gutters need doing at the same time, or our reviews for what people locally say about the work.