Roofers in East Grinstead

East Grinstead is a Wealden market town on a ridge, and its High Street is the reason a roofer looks twice at the place. Mid Sussex District Council's conservation area appraisal says the south side of the High Street has the longest run of timber-framed buildings in England, and that they began as medieval open hall houses, some of the Wealden type. An open hall house was one tall room open to the rafters, with a fire in the middle, so the roof was part of the room. Later owners floored it over, added chimneys and divided the space, which means the roof structure above many of these buildings has been altered more than once. Nobody should treat it as a simple modern pitched roof, and nobody should price it as one.

1.1 Reading an old frame before touching the covering

On a frame like this the tiles are just the visible skin. Beneath them sit rafters, purlins and wall plates that may be hundreds of years old, with joints that have moved to suit the building. Before we say repair or replace, we look at how the frame carries the roof, whether the battens (the thin timber strips each row of tiles hooks over) are sound, and whether an underlay (the sheet under the tiles) was ever added. A slipped tile is an easy fix. A sagging slope asks a bigger question about the timbers beneath it, and that calls for a survey, with photographs taken on your own roof, rather than a guess from the pavement. Our pitched roofing page shows how tiled slopes are taken off, repaired and relaid.

1.2 Valleys, party walls and shared roof lines

Buildings along a medieval street rarely have tidy boundaries. One roof runs into the next, a valley (the sloping gutter where two roof planes meet) may carry water from two properties into one outlet, and a party wall (the wall shared between neighbours) may have been rebuilt in a different century from the roof beside it. Flashing is the strip of lead or other metal that bridges the gap between a slope and a chimney or abutting wall, and these junctions are where leaks tend to start. Water that finds its way into an old frame does slow damage you cannot see from inside, so a small stain on a ceiling is worth chasing sooner rather than later. A leak gets made safe before anything else, and the lasting repair comes after we have found the cause. Where a job needs access across a neighbour's roof or a shared passage, we raise it before the work starts so nobody is surprised by scaffolding.

The rest of the old centre is brick, clay tile and tile-hanging, and the appraisal lists all three among the town centre's materials. Tile-hanging is the practice of covering a wall with rows of small tiles hung on battens, and in a Wealden town it often sits directly beneath a roof, so the two coverings have to meet neatly. The junction between a roof and a tile-hung wall is a place where rain can get behind the tiles if the flashing has lifted or the lap is too short. A fault there can look like a damp wall when the real cause is the roof, which is why we trace the water back before quoting. Our tile hanging repairs guide covers the wall side of that joint in more detail.

3.1 Ridges, hips and verges on clay tile

On a tiled roof the edges are where age shows first. Along the crest sits the ridge, down the outer corners run the hips, and over a gable wall the roof ends at the verge. Older roofs had these bedded in mortar and nothing else. BS 5534, revised in 2014, no longer lets bedding mortar do the holding by itself: ridge and hip tiles get clips or screws as well. We refix them that way, because a ridge that lifts in a gale takes its neighbours with it. Chimneys on these roofs often need attention at the same visit, and our chimney repairs page covers the flaunching (the mortar cap that holds the pots) and the lead around the stack. Between them, those two jobs account for many of the calls that sound alarming but turn out to be local and fixable.

3.2 St Swithun's church and listed roofs

St Swithun's church is listed Grade II*, first listed on 28 January 1948. A church roof has its own consent route, and the route depends on the building and how it is used. Where the church belongs to the Church of England and is in use, works to its listed fabric go through the faculty system rather than the council. A building that has stopped being used for worship falls under the ordinary listed building rules instead. Whoever looks after a roof like this needs a clear written account of what is wrong before any approving body will engage, so we describe each fault and photograph it from the scaffold or the ladder. That record helps with the approval and leaves the repair itself in no doubt.