Roofers in Hove

Hove is a town that arrived quickly. The county history says it had only 101 people in 1801, yet fifty years later it had over 4,000, and its growth as a watering-place began in the second quarter of the 19th century. It lay along the coast to the west of Brighton, beyond the end of the west cliff, and the parish reached north to the lower slopes of the Downs. Hove Borough Council designated the Brunswick Town Conservation Area in 1969 and extended it in 1977, and Brighton and Hove City Council now looks after it. Brunswick Square, completed in 1827, and Brunswick Terrace, finished in 1828, are both Grade I listed, and so is St Andrew's Church on Waterloo Street, which dates from 1827.

1.1 What Grade I means for a roof job

Grade I is the top of the listing scale. Under the 1990 listed buildings Act, any work that would change what makes a listed building special needs consent before it starts. Putting back exactly what was there is one thing, and altering the covering, the stacks or the rooflights is quite another. On a listed house the list entry is our first read, ahead of any quote, and we suggest you ask the city council's conservation team whether your repair counts as like for like before the scaffold goes up. That one call can save a stop-start job.

1.2 Shared terraces and chimney stacks

In any terrace the neighbours share more than a wall. Rain finds the weakest point along a whole row, so a leak in your top-floor bedroom may begin at the party wall flashing, in a neighbour's gutter or at a stack that serves four houses. Flashings, the metal strips dressed into the joint where a roof meets masonry, are among the details that fail first on an old roofline. Chimney stacks carry their own protection in the Brunswick direction, which asks for consent before stacks or pots are removed in the streets it covers. Taking out a chimney breast on a party wall brings Building Regulations approval and a party wall notice, so that is a conversation to have with the neighbours early. Our chimney repairs page explains how stacks are repointed, flaunched and flashed. Photographing the whole run of roofs from the road, and from the nearest safe point above it, shows where neighbouring work has changed the line.

Old Hove was designated a conservation area in 1997, and its old parish church of St Andrew was rebuilt in 1836 except for the nave arcades, in flint-work with dressings in Roman cement. Flint and cement dressings take rainwater differently from slate, so a roof edge beside them wants careful lead work. For a Church of England church still in worship use, the Church's own faculty route stands in for listed building consent, so a parish takes roof plans through that process. Hove grew from 101 people in 1801 to a municipal borough with a royal charter in 1898, so its roofs were not all built at once. The first job on any Hove roof is to establish which decade it belongs to, because the age of the battens, the underlay and the fixings underneath tells us more than the covering on top.

3.1 Flats, shared roofs and who decides

Where a Hove home is a flat, its roof is normally shared, so the decision sits with the freeholder or managing agent, not with one leaseholder. The permitted development rules for houses do not cover flats, which makes the council's planning team the right first call for any change to the look of the roof. Where a block has a flat roof, the covering is laid to a fall, so water runs off rather than lying, and BS 6229:2025 sets a minimum finished fall of 1:80. Roofers design steeper, so the finished surface still drains. Our flat roofing page describes the membranes we fit and how falls are set. The Planning Portal sets the test: building control need not normally be sought where less than 25 per cent of the building envelope and less than 50 per cent of the roof is involved. A big job on a shared block can cross that line, and the council's building control team or a registered building control approver can confirm.

3.2 Seafront weather

Along the front the weather arrives at full strength: gales, rain driven sideways and salt in the air. Roofs there get tested every winter, which is why we study edge trims, ridges and flashings first, and let the survey photographs decide between a mend and a new covering. The age of the roof and the state of its details settle the job, not the postcode. A scaffold on a Hove street needs a licence from the city council as highway authority, so build that wait into your dates and check with your roofer who files it. Once the survey is done, one total price follows in writing, covering the whole job.