Old skills, young shoulders: Stephen Graham, lead worker and slater

Stephen Graham has become accustomed to the heights but lugging a roll of lead weighing 140kg across a roof, even with a colleague, is hard work.

Yet Mr Graham, 25, now has enviable job security as a lead worker and slater. “Everybody is saying, ‘Are you watching this? You’ll be doing it all yourself one day’.”

Work on Britain’s rich legacy of heritage buildings is thriving, giving craftsmen with specialist skills all the work they can handle. “There are not a lot of people getting the training I have,” said Mr Graham, who is learning from workmates, all a generation older than him.

But there, amid the boom in heritage renovation, lies a familiar problem: a looming skills crisis as tradesmen in their 50s and 60s, the mainstay of the sector, approach retirement and not enough younger people inherit their knowledge.

“In 10 years’ time, skilled heritage masons will be like early 1990s plumbers in London — there will be so few of them they will be naming their price,” said Richard Pavlou, operations manager of Stone Technical Services Group (STS), a specialist in high-rise maintenance including lightning protection and steeplejack work.

In 2005, the National Heritage Training Group estimated the built heritage sector needed 6,500 additional craftspeople. Yet the number of apprentices and trainees in heritage-related craft skills dropped 78 per cent from 2005 to 4,526 in 2013-14.

Cathie Clarke, general manager at the NHTG, said: “General knowledge and understanding of old buildings and solid-wall construction is missing.” The problem, she added, was that heritage training was not mainstream.

Contractors say key shortages include lime plasterers, heritage slaters to mend roofs and steeplejacks, who scale objects such as church spires, industrial chimneys and clock towers. There is also a supply-chain shortage of blacksmiths, who are needed to sharpen the picks used to hole slates. Training courses and qualifications are available but much of the specialist learning has to be on the job.

The heritage sector is not just about landmarks and listed buildings. There are more than 5.4m pre-1919 buildings in England alone. Most are not listed but they still require specialist knowledge and skills to be maintained. Indeed, pre-1919 buildings comprise one in five of all the UK’s stock.

The sector is “extremely buoyant”, said Alan Chapman, heritage director at Matthew Charlton Slaters — Mr Graham’s employer — which is working on buildings ranging from Durham Cathedral and National Trust properties to private houses. The business, now a subsidiary of the Northern Bear building services group, dates back to 1842. “It really started to pick up coming out of recession in 2012,” he said.

Mr Pavlou of STS, whose workload includes the Royal Courts of Justice in London and the Forth Road Bridge, concurred. “We are absolutely flat out at the moment,” he said.

Heritage businesses say the increase in work stems from a greater awareness of the importance of looking after older buildings properly allied to an increase in grant aid from bodies such as the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The workload has also been increased by extreme weather, such as the recent bouts of flooding, and the need to rectify botched repairs carried out by non-specialists using potentially damaging materials, such as cement rather than lime mortar.

The UK has a vast inherited wealth of heritage buildings. Graeme Millar, managing director of Scotland-based heritage roofing specialist Bain & Irvine and vice-president of the International Federation for the Roofing Trade, says his European counterparts are “in awe” at the range and quality.

These buildings not only shape the country’s character and sense of identity, they are economically highly significant, too. According to Historic England’s Heritage Counts 2015 report, built heritage tourism directly accounted for £5.1bn of UK GDP in 2011, while repair and maintenance of historic buildings, including supply chain purchases, generated £11bn in England alone. In 2014, there were 66.7m visits to heritage sites.

The Heritage Lottery Fund spent £221.4m in 2014-15 on building works, and its spending for the next fiscal year is expected to be even higher.

The National Trust is due to spend £27.5m on maintenance of historic properties in 2015-16, double the amount of a decade ago, as well as funding work on estate and garden buildings, historic interiors and other projects. English Heritage was given a one-off grant of £80m to fund a repairs backlog when it was split into the English Heritage Trust and Historic England last year.

Despite the enthusiasm for heritage and the need to keep it in good condition, many of the skills needed in the industry are not held in high regard — to the chagrin of the specialists.

“Slating in our country is always looked upon as a poor man’s trade,” says Mr Millar, whose business works on some of Scotland’s finest buildings. “But slating in Germany, in particular, is viewed as a real skill. Young people are clamouring to get into it.”

STS has launched a recruitment drive but “we don’t get inundated with applications from young guys”, says Mr Pavlou. One recent success — recruiting three rope-access technicians — resulted from lay-offs in the North Sea oil sector. Usually, however, “it is really difficult to find the right ones”.

The National Heritage Training Group sees an excellent recruiting opportunity in one of the biggest heritage projects of them all: the forthcoming restoration of the Palace of Westminster. It wants the government to demand that all contractors hold, or are working towards, accredited heritage qualifications.