Roofers in Felpham

Felpham's old village sits a short way inland from the beach, gathered around the parish church of St Mary, whose tower the council's character appraisal treats as the key landmark. Arun District Council designated the Felpham Conservation Area in February 1985. It covers about 9 hectares and 261 properties, of which 18 are statutorily listed and another 18 locally listed as buildings of character. The appraisal names the traditional palette: coursed flint cobbles, first gathered from the beach and laid in tight even courses, orange and red clay brick, and orange and red clay tile for the roofs. Flint is the material that dominates, in houses, outbuildings and the high boundary walls along Vicarage Lane, Limmer Lane and Felpham Road. Where a roof meets one of those walls, the joint deserves as much care as the roof itself.

1.1 Thatch on Felpham Road and at Blake's Cottage

Thatch is the surprise here. Along Felpham Road the appraisal lists the flint cottages at numbers 101 and 103 and the barn at 104 under thatch, all of them listed. Pear Tree Cottage in Vicarage Lane, which the Victoria County History dates to the early 16th century, keeps a hipped thatched roof over its timber frame. Blake's Cottage is roughcast and whitewashed under thatch. Thatching is a craft of its own. Our part on these lanes is the lead flashing (the strip that seals a roof to a wall or stack), the chimneys, and the tiled and slated roofs next door, many of which meet something far older at a party wall or a shared gutter.

1.2 Slate and chimneys along Waterloo Road

A few minutes' walk away the roofs change. The terraced cottages on Waterloo Road, Fisherman's, Southside, Seaway and Thimble among them, are rendered two-storey houses with slate roofs and chimneys, and the appraisal records slate alongside orange-red clay tile across the Vicarage Lane area. Common slate jobs are refixing slipped slates with a tingle (a small metal clip that holds a slate without stripping the course above) and renewing the lead around those stacks. On a listed house, works that would affect its character need listed building consent, so we read the list entry before quoting anything beyond a like-for-like repair. Our pitched roofing page explains how tiled and slated slopes are stripped and relaid. If you are weighing up roof windows inside the boundary, read our guide to skylight planning permission first.

Between the wars Felpham filled up estate by estate, and the Victoria County History says the trees and grass verges gave the south of the parish the look of a garden city by the sea. Several of those estates were still private in 1992. Each has its own date, and on a roof the date matters, because it hints at the age of the battens (the softwood laths each course of tiles hooks over), the underlay (the sheet beneath them) and the nails, if nobody has re-roofed since. A house on Summerley built in the late 1920s and one on Flansham Park built in the 1970s can stand a mile apart and need quite different work.

3.1 Felpham Beach, Summerley and Limmer Lane

The Felpham Beach estate south of Limmer Lane had at least four houses in 1918 and many by 1927, its streets set out in a rectangle around an oblong green. Summerley, further east, was laid out after about 1922 and was called the chief estate in the parish in 1927. Its western part has straight roads; the later part to the north and east curves round a patch of woodland in Crossbush Road, and its eastern end was not finished until after 1945. Big houses went up along Limmer Lane itself. North of the main road, the Roundle estate had its first houses by 1932, with Roundle Square set around a central lawn, and Downview Road was laid out by 1934. West of the village, the lower part of Links Avenue was built up by the farmer E. F. Sait around 1909 to 1912, and by 1934 the old golf course land to its north held detached houses and bungalows.

3.2 Hurstwood, Flansham Park and the council houses

East of Flansham Lane the private Hurstwood estate was built during the 1930s, while the rural and urban district councils put up council houses in Felpham Way and Flansham Lane in the 1920s and 30s. In 1963 the Bognor Regis urban district council bought 200 acres beyond Hurstwood, and the large Flansham Park estate followed in the 1970s. Where an older roof's ridge (the capping along the top) and hips (the sloping outer corners) still sit on nothing but a bed of mortar, they fall short of BS 5534 as revised in 2014, under which new ridges and hips get screws or clips too. The verge, the edge where tiles stop at a gable wall, is treated the same way. The HSE says to assume a garage or outbuilding built or refurbished before 2000 contains asbestos until checked. Our roof repairs page covers the smaller jobs these estates tend to need.