Roofers in Almodington

Almodington is not named in Domesday, and it was united with Earnley in 1526. The hamlet has no parish church of its own and shares Earnley's. The shape of the place today comes from a much later event. In 1935 the Land Settlement Association bought farms including Batchmeres Farm at Almodington and divided them into about 130 holdings of four to five acres. Each had a house, greenhouses and piggeries, and the tenants were unemployed men from the north-east and South Wales. Nearly a century on, the layout of small plots and scattered houses is still what you see. Roofs have followed the same pattern. They were put up for people with little money and a lot of work to do, repaired when something broke, and rarely surveyed as a whole. That is why a first visit here is often the first time anyone has looked at the whole roof.

1.1 A roof that has done more than ninety years

A house built for that scheme will be more than ninety years old. We do not assume what it was covered in, because the settlement houses have been altered over time, and the sound way to find out is to look. In the loft we check the underlay, the battens, the rafters and the condition of the nails. On the slope we check the ridge, the verges (the edges along the gable ends) and the flashings. A roof of that age that has never been touched is due a hard look. One that has been re-covered since may need little more than gutters and a chimney. Our roof repairs page explains how we decide between a patch and more.

1.2 Extensions and flat-roofed additions

A smallholding house that has been in use for decades will usually have been extended: a kitchen at the back, a porch, a lean-to. Those additions bring flat or low-pitch roofs, and the joint where the new roof meets the old wall is a common leak. BS 6229:2025 gives a minimum finished fall of 1:80 for a flat roof, and we plan steeper so the surface drains properly. Ponding on a flat roof is the sign to watch for: water that is still standing two days after rain means the fall is wrong or the deck has sagged. Our flat roofing page lists the coverings we lay and what each suits. On an extension, the choice of covering depends on how the roof is used, how big it is and how the edges and upstands are detailed, and we explain the reasons for our pick.

Almodington is a hamlet on the flat Manhood Peninsula between Earnley and Sidlesham, among nurseries and glasshouses. The land is low and open. In 1792 some 230 acres of waste at Almodington Green were enclosed, and an 18th-century octagonal tapering windmill, covered with weather-boarding, stands in the north of Earnley parish near the old Almodington boundary. A windmill is built to catch the wind, and that tells you something about the ground. Roofs here have little shelter from gales and driving rain. The ground is flat, so water has few places to go and wind has few things to slow it, and both reach the roof with their full force. A tile or a sheet that works loose on a calm day will move further on a rough one, so we fix the small faults before the weather makes them large.

3.1 Fixings that hold in a gale

Out on open ground, the ridge line, the hips and the gable edges take the worst of it. Ridge and hip tiles bedded on mortar alone were once standard. Since the 2014 revision of BS 5534, they are expected to be mechanically fixed as well. If your ridge is cracked or the mortar is crumbling, we refix it with clips or screws. At the verge we check that each tile is held and that the mortar or dry-fix trim is intact. A loose verge lets wind get under the tiles, and a gale can lift a run of them at once. That is the kind of failure that turns a small repair into a bigger one overnight.

3.2 Gutters and drainage on flat land

On flat ground, rainwater from the roof has nowhere to run to, and a blocked downpipe fills the gutter and spills over the wall. We clear and check the whole roofline at a first visit and show the result in photographs. If the fascia boards or soffits are rotten, we show you where. The same close look applies to a house as to a nursery shed.

3.3 Wildlife and access

Bats and nesting birds are protected, and a roof can shelter both, so we look before disturbing eaves or ridge. Scaffold that would stand on the road or footway needs a licence from West Sussex County Council, which asks for 10 working days' notice. We build that wait into the start date.