Roofers in North Mundham

North Mundham's parish church stands in the middle of the village, and the roofs around it are best read from there. St Stephen's nave and aisles are 13th-century, the tower came about 1550, and its walls are rubble with ashlar dressings beneath a tiled roof. A tile roof that old has been patched, relaid and patched again over the centuries, which is a useful reminder for any house nearby: a covering does not have to be original to be sound, and it does not have to be replaced just because it looks weathered. Just north of the church the course of the old Arundel to Chichester canal crosses the parish. The canal is long disused, but the ground it ran through is flat and open, and a roof on open ground meets weather from every side.

1.1 Reading a tiled roof from the ground

Many faults on a tiled slope show from the garden if you know what to look for. A tile that has slipped leaves a dark gap in the course. A tile that has cracked sheds water at a different angle from its neighbours. Green growth on the lower courses points to a roof that stays damp, usually where a tree overhangs or a gutter has been overflowing. Binoculars and a dry afternoon tell you more than a ladder does, and they keep your feet on the ground. If the ridge (the row of capping tiles at the apex of the roof) looks uneven, or the verge (where the roof finishes at the side of a gable wall) has opened a gap, those are the two spots we check first, because both rely on fixings that loosen with age and both take the worst of a gale.

1.2 Chimneys and the lead around them

Older houses in a village like this tend to carry a chimney or two, and the point where a stack meets the roof is where many leaks start. The strip of lead that seals the joint is a flashing, and the small folded pieces woven in beneath the tiles beside the stack are soakers. A cement fillet used as a cheap seal cracks away from the brickwork; lead dressed into the joint moves with the stack instead. Our chimney repairs page explains what we check on a stack, and the leadwork guide covers the metal itself. A listed house is a different case: any alteration that touches its special character needs listed building consent, so we read its listing description first and keep to a like-for-like repair unless the council says otherwise.

The county history records a late-17th-century farmhouse at South Mundham built of red and black bricks and covered in slate, and a cottage built of flints. Slate on brick is a hard-wearing pairing, and it has known weak points. Natural slate is held by nails, and when a nail fails or a slate cracks at the nail hole, a slate slips. The cheap answer is a smear of sealant under it. The better answer is a tingle, a short metal clip hooked over the batten, which secures the slate and leaves the courses above untouched. Slates slip one at a time at first, and a roof that drops several in a season is telling you the fixings are going all over.

3.1 Slate pitch and fixings

Slate relies on a decent slope to shed rain. Cupa Pizarras, writing about BS 5534, gives 20 degrees as the minimum pitch for natural slate when the slate is 500 mm long and exposure is moderate, and advises that hook fixings are not used on any pitch under 25 degrees. A lean-to or a low porch roof on an old house may be shallower than that, and the answer there may be lead or another covering rather than slate. Matching the main roof is a good aim, but a roof that leaks because its slope is too gentle for its slates is not helped by a perfect match. We measure the pitch before we suggest a material. Our slate roofing page covers sorting, matching and relaying old slates.

3.2 Brick earth and the working ground at Runcton

Runcton, within the parish, lies over extensive deposits of brick earth, and large nurseries to the north and east form an Area for Horticultural Development in the local plan, according to the council's Runcton appraisal. That is a working landscape, and houses in a working landscape collect extras: a garage, a lean-to, a single-storey extension behind the main house. Those often have a flat roof, which is a different job from the pitched roof in front. Falls (the slope that carries water to the outlet), upstands and the edge trims decide how long a flat roof lasts, and a patch that fails twice is usually telling you the deck or the covering needs attention. Gutters on a farmhouse eaves also work hard, so we clear them and check the joints, the brackets and the fall while we are up there. Water that spills over a blocked gutter runs down a stone or brick wall, and the damp mark inside is often put down to the roof.