Roofers in Angmering

Arun District Council designated Angmering's conservation area in April 1975. Its draft character appraisal of January 2026 sets out the palette of the area: flint, various types of brick, render, and roofs of slate, with both natural slate and clay tiles present. That description belongs to the conservation area alone, and it says nothing about the estates and avenues beyond it. It does tell a roofer what to bring to a job in the old centre, and it tells a homeowner what to expect when the first question is whether the new covering matches the old.

1.1 What an old slate roof asks of you

Natural slate is long-lived. Well-kept slate can give more than a century of use, though that is a typical figure and never a promise. The weak point is seldom the slate. It is the fixing. Nails corrode, a slate loosens, and a roof that looks tidy from the pavement starts shedding pieces in a gale. One slipped slate can be held by a tingle, a little metal strip that grips it without disturbing the course above. Once the fixings give out over a whole slope, the sounder repair is to strip that slope and lay the good slates back. Our slate roofing page describes that process.

1.2 Clay tile and the question of age

Marley, citing the Building Research Establishment, gives clay tile a minimum life expectancy of 60 years, while a conservation article on clay tiles warns that the 60-year figure is clearly not a reliable guide for old peg-tile roofs, the hand-made tiles that hang on small wooden pegs. So age is a reason to look closely and nothing more. A Victorian roof can be sound under a skin of moss, and a newer roof laid over poor underlay, the waterproof sheet beneath the tiles, can fail early.

1.3 Matching what the street already has

Inside the boundary, replacement tile or slate should follow the pattern that is already there, since the council's own appraisal counts slate and clay tile as part of the village. If you want a different covering, put the question to Arun District Council's planning officers before ordering it, and tell us if the house is listed. We then price the like-for-like job on its own and flag any change that could need consent, so the decision is yours before work starts, not after the scaffold is up. The same goes for the lead round the stacks: where a flashing has to be renewed beside slate, it is dressed in lead and tucked into the wall, not smeared with sealant, because sealant is a short-term fix that fails at the joint it was meant to protect.

The railway came in 1846, and the council's appraisal ties it to a market gardening trade that flourished in the middle of the 19th century and fell away sharply in the 1950s and 1960s. A village shaped by the station and by that trade has buildings of many dates, and garages and outbuildings have been added to plots of every kind.

3.1 Garages and outbuildings

For a garage or outbuilding built or refurbished before 2000, the HSE's rule of thumb is to assume asbestos is there until a test says otherwise. For a garage or lean-to with a sheet roof, that means a proper check before anyone steps onto it, because asbestos cement roofs are always fragile. Carefully removing asbestos cement sheets without breaking them up counts as non-licensed work. If the sheets break and release significant dust, the job becomes notifiable non-licensed work, and household asbestos waste travels on a consignment note. We tell you after the survey which route applies, and our garage roof replacement page covers the wider options. Whatever the sheets turn out to be, they are lowered carefully by hand and the waste leaves the site with you holding the paperwork.