Two Blokes, Two Trades & One Very Good Idea
Copper Plumbing & Home Improvements did not come about through a business plan or a marketing strategy. It came about the way most good ideas do — through two people who knew their subject inside out, recognised a gap that needed filling, and decided to do something about it.
The gap was straightforward enough. For all the home improvement content that exists on the internet, an awful lot of it is written by people who have never actually done the work. Articles that sound plausible but miss the details that matter. Tutorials that get you halfway through a job and then leave you stranded. Advice that would make any qualified tradesperson wince.
Colin and Peter had been on the other end of that problem for years — called out to sort jobs that had gone wrong because someone followed bad advice online. In 2001, after years working together for one of the UK’s best known house builders, they decided to do something about it. They set up Copper Plumbing & Home Improvements and started writing down everything they knew.
That was over twenty years ago. The site has grown considerably since then. The approach has not changed at all.
The Name
People ask about the name fairly regularly and the answer always raises a smile. It was not dreamed up by a branding agency or arrived at after a lengthy naming session. It came directly from the two people behind it.
Take the first two letters of Colin’s first name — CO. Add the first letter of his surname, Page — P. Then take the first letter of Peter’s first name — P — and the first letter of his surname, Radcliffe — R. Put it all together and you get COPPER.
A happy accident that gave them a name rooted in their trade — copper pipe having been the backbone of British plumbing for generations. It works on every level and they have never once regretted it.
Colin Page — Builder & Home Improvement Specialist
Colin has been building and improving homes for as long as he can remember. He served his time as a general builder, worked his way through every aspect of residential construction and spent years as part of the team at a major UK house builder — gaining an understanding of how homes are put together from the ground up that very few people outside the industry ever develop.
There is virtually nothing on a standard house build or modernisation that Colin has not turned his hand to. Brickwork, plastering, carpentry, tiling, rendering, roofing, extensions, loft conversions — he has done all of it, repeatedly, in all conditions and on every type of property from new builds to Victorian terraces. He is the kind of builder who takes quiet pride in doing things properly the first time so that nobody has to come back and do them again.
On the site Colin covers the full breadth of home improvement and building work — practical, jargon-free guidance written from the perspective of someone who has done every job hundreds of times and knows exactly where things go wrong, why they go wrong and how to make sure they do not.
Peter Radcliffe — Plumber, Electrician & Gas Engineer
Peter is the fully qualified half of the Copper partnership — certified across plumbing, electrics and gas installation, which puts him in a remarkably small group of tradespeople who genuinely understand how all three of a home’s critical systems interact with each other. That breadth of qualification was not accidental. Peter always wanted to understand the whole picture rather than just one part of it, and two decades of working across all three disciplines have given him a depth of knowledge that most specialists in any single one of them simply do not have.
Like Colin, Peter spent years working for a major house builder before striking out independently in 2001. He has since worked on hundreds of residential properties across Yorkshire — new installations, repairs, upgrades and the kind of diagnostic work that gets called in when something has gone wrong and nobody else can work out why.
Peter is straight-talking, safety-conscious and has absolutely no patience for corners being cut in areas where cutting corners gets people hurt. On the site he covers plumbing, electrical and gas topics with the same consistent message running through all of it — here is what you can confidently tackle yourself, here is precisely where you stop and call a professional, and here is exactly why that line sits where it does. He explains it all clearly, without jargon and without ever making anyone feel foolish for not already knowing it.
Why We Do This
Between us we have well over forty years of hands-on experience across building, plumbing, electrics and gas. We have answered the same questions thousands of times — on jobs, over the phone, at neighbours’ front doors, in the pub. At some point it simply made more sense to write it all down in one place where anyone could find it at any time.
There is no hidden agenda here. No services to sell, no contractors to recommend for a fee, no content produced by writers who have never held a pipe wrench. Just two Yorkshire tradesmen sharing what they know — honestly, clearly and with the kind of practical detail that actually makes a difference when you are standing in front of a job and trying to work out what to do next.
We hope it helps.
Colin & Peter