Roofers in Rudgwick

Old Rudgwick stood at the top end of Church Street, nearly all of it along the west side, and that stretch is now the Rudgwick Conservation Area. The cottage called Two Wells, which used to be Ivy Cottages, goes back to about 1400, and Eames House just along the lane is a 16th-century hall house. Buildings that old have almost certainly had their roofs taken off and put back more than once. What you see from the road may be a couple of centuries younger than the walls under it, and the gap between outside and inside is where most surprises hide. So before we say a word about the job, we want to stand in the loft and see how the roof was put together.

1.1 Horsham stone and what it asks of a roofer

A photograph taken around 1905 shows Holy Trinity wearing a Horsham stone roof. This is hand-split stone, thick and heavy, laid in diminishing courses: rows that step down in size, the biggest slabs along the bottom edge and the smallest at the top. The weight sets the order of work. We look at rafters and wall plates before the covering, because a good stone roof on tired timber is a repair that lets you down. The usual faults are slabs that have slid as their pegs or nails gave up, joints that have lost their mortar, and the lead where a roof meets a chimney or wall. Our Horsham stone roofing page shows how slabs are lifted, sorted by size and relaid so that as many as possible go back where they came from.

1.2 What consent looks like in a conservation area

Re-covering that keeps a roof's appearance unchanged does not normally count as development, so planning permission is not usually needed. The exceptions bite hard in a village like this. On a listed cottage, anything touching its character calls for listed building consent, and a council can withdraw rights with an Article 4 direction. Whether one reaches roofs in Rudgwick is for Horsham District Council to say, so put your address to its planning team before you change the colour, size or material of a covering. We read the list entry, take pictures of the slabs or tiles already there, and a written quote reaches you once we have surveyed. Matching matters as much as sound workmanship: a modern concrete tile on a village roof of clay or stone stands out for years, and a conservation officer is likely to notice it.

When the railway came in 1865 the centre of Rudgwick moved south, away from the church on the ridge, and the Martlet Inn opened in the same year to serve people stepping off the trains. For roofs the result is easy to state: two ages of building stand a short walk apart. The Church Street core is medieval and early modern, while the streets around the newer centre were put up later, in several rounds. We never guess a covering from a postcode. The only reliable way to learn what a roof is made of, and how tired it is, is to climb up and look at it.

3.1 Reading the age of a roof from inside

Up in the loft we examine the roof's hidden layers. Battens are the small timber strips that tiles are hung from, and the underlay is the membrane beneath them that catches whatever gets past. We look at the nail heads too, and at any daylight showing through. Brittle, torn underlay and rusted fixings on a roof never re-covered usually settle whether a patch is worth the trouble. Staining on rafters and a damp smell in one corner point us to the spot water has been coming in, which is often a long way from the stain on the ceiling below. Where the structure is sound and only some tiles have failed, a repair is the right answer, and our roof repairs page describes how we go about one. Pictures of every fault arrive with the quote.

3.2 Where one roof runs into another

Houses that have grown by extension tend to collect valleys, which are the troughs where two slopes meet, along with chimney stacks and wall junctions. Each needs a flashing, the metal collar that stops rain tracking in where roof meets masonry. Soakers are folded lead tabs woven between the courses beside a wall. Our lead roofing and leadwork page explains how we dress them so they last.

3.3 When a new covering needs approval

According to the Planning Portal, building control is normally not involved while the work affects less than 25 per cent of the total building envelope and less than 50 per cent of the roof. A heavier covering, structural alterations or a covering that behaves differently in a fire can change that, and Horsham District Council's building control team or a registered building control approver will tell you where your job stands. If it is notifiable, we explain what is involved and file the notification ourselves, so the certificate is in your hands when the scaffold comes down.