A four-man practice based in Burford, working across the Cotswolds, Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley on listed buildings, conservation projects, and the kind of pitched roofs nobody else will quote on.
Camber & Lead was started by Jack Camber, a Cotswold slater from Stonesfield, in the summer of 1948. He was nineteen, just out of the army, and he had a single ladder and an apprentice. By the time he retired he had three sons in the business, two of whom went into leadwork.
Seventy-eight years on we are still a small practice — four roofers, a leadworker, an apprentice, an office of one. We choose to stay that size. It is the only way we know how to do the work properly.
Most of our clients come to us because they own a building that is older than they are, and the wrong roofing decision could ruin it. We are careful with what is already there, honest about what we cannot save, and slow enough to do the bit you cannot see as well as we do the bit you can.
There is very little of the modern roofing world we are interested in. There is a great deal of the older world that nobody else seems to want to do.
Traditional limestone-tile roofs, sourced from local quarries where possible and salvaged where it makes more sense. Re-bedded in lime, never cement. Ridge tiles hand-bedded; valleys lined in lead, not in pre-formed plastic. We will tell you up front if we think your roof is too far gone to save tiles from.
Penrhyn and Cwt-y-Bugail slate, sized properly to your building. New oak battens, breathable underlay, hand-bossed lead flashings. We work alongside conservation officers where the listing requires it, and we sign every job off with a fully photographed handover.
Code 5 and Code 6 sand-cast and milled lead, formed on site, never delivered pre-shaped. Parapets, valleys, gulleys, dormers and chimney trays. The only flashings we will fit are lead — the polymer-foil substitutes don't last, and they will not pass a heritage inspection.
Single-skin or double-skin, brick or stone, with new clay pots and lime mortar where the original building demands it. We carry stocks of old hand-made bricks for repairs to listed properties, and we leave the chimney looking like it has been there since the building was first finished.
For our existing clients and listed-building owners across the wider Cotswolds, we run a small emergency roster: one of three roofers on call to keep water out of a building until proper work can begin. We don't tarp permanent solutions, and we don't gouge fees in a storm.
Where the roof meets the stonework — parapets, gable copings, kneelers, and decorative leadlight gulleys — we can do the masonry as well. It avoids the daisy-chain of three firms blaming each other when something goes wrong at the join.
A complete Stonesfield-tile re-roof on the south-east range, with lead-lined valleys, new oak battens, and three chimneys rebuilt from base. Approved by the conservation officer in two visits.
The previous owners had been told by two firms that the original Stonesfield tiles couldn't be reused — that the only sensible answer was a complete reproduction in modern concrete. We disagreed. Of the original 14,200 tiles, we rescued 11,640. The rest came from a reclamation yard in Burford that we have known since the 1980s.
The lead-lined valleys are Code 6, hand-bossed, fitted by Tom Camber (Sam's brother) over the course of a fortnight in March. Every joint is rolled, every welt is dressed. There isn't a piece of pre-formed sheet on the building.
A few clients have been kind enough to write since 2020. We've left out the embarrassing ones, but we'll happily forward those too.
"Two other firms had told us our roof was unsavable. Sam came round, walked it for an hour, and said it absolutely was savable, and quoted to prove it. The building is a hundred years closer to safe because of him."
"They turn up when they say they will, in a van you'd buy a house from, and they leave the place cleaner than they found it. And the work is faultless."
"The conservation officer told us afterwards that the chimney rebuild was 'as good a piece of repair work as I've seen in twenty years on this beat'. And he's not a man given to compliments."
"We had a leak. They were on a ladder by nine the next morning, on their own kit, with two pieces of code-six lead in the back of the van. That is what a roofer should be."
We keep the yard in Burford because most of our work is in walking distance of it. For listed-building projects further afield, we'll travel — but you should expect a slower start.
We try to come back to every enquiry within three working days, with an honest answer about whether your project is the kind of thing we can do justice to. For straightforward surveys we'll usually offer a date within two to three weeks; for listed buildings, give us a month.
Our books for spring 2027 open in early October. We currently have one window for late autumn 2026 on a chimney rebuild and a single emergency lead day a week, held for existing clients.