Roofers in Southwater

Southwater's oldest landmark is Holy Innocents, a church of local stone in a curvilinear Gothic style that opened in 1850. The British History Online chapters on Horsham add that Southwater station opened in 1861 and closed in 1966. Those two dates frame the first chapter of the place: a settlement in the Low Weald, south of Horsham, that gained a parish church and then a railway station. Older houses in the village went up long before modern roofing standards, so when we climb onto an older roof here, the first job is simply to find out what it is made of, and that happens before any opinion is given.

1.1 Why a church roof is a different animal

A stone Gothic church has steep pitches, parapets and valley gutters that look nothing like a semi's. Rain leaving a high slope has a long way to fall, so the gutters and downpipes carry more water than a cottage ever sends them, and the lead lining them is battered by sun and frost in turn. Holy Innocents is listed Grade II and serves as an Anglican parish church, and for as long as worship goes on there, listed building control gives way to the faculty system, the church's own route for approving repairs. A parish looking after its roof should go to its own advisers first. A house next door is another matter: its roof is an ordinary domestic job, even if a boundary gutter or wall needs a quiet word with the churchwardens.

1.2 Lead on the junctions

Sheet lead comes in numbered codes that fix its thickness. Royston Lead's brochure lists code 4, at 1.80 mm, and code 5, at 2.24 mm, for flashings, and codes 5 to 8 for parapet and box gutters, which is the kind of lining a church or a deep valley needs. Flashings, the lead strips dressed up a wall or round a chimney, are normally the first part of the system to lift.

1.3 Reading the older houses in the village

For any older house in the village, we start at the places where two materials meet: the chimney flashings, the gable verge, the valley between two slopes and the spot where a porch or bay roof joins the main one. The open slope across the middle is normally the healthiest part. Our roof repairs page shows how a patch that will hold is told apart from a job that needs to be bigger, and every verdict we give comes with photographs of your own roof.

The bulk of Southwater's expansion came after about 1950, and above all after 1970. Around 1982 there were about 1,600 houses, with another 200 planned, and an eastern bypass opened the same year. Houses of the 1970s and early 1980s are now past forty, which is longer than most published lifespans for a felt flat roof. Estates like these commonly carry garages, porches and single-storey extensions with flat roofs beside the pitched main roof, and the flat sections are often the first to wear out.

3.1 Flat roofs on garages and extensions

Less gives torch-on felt 10 to 20 years, adding that a good job can reach 20 and a poor one can fail inside 10. EPDM, a synthetic rubber sheet, is quoted at 20 to 30 years or more, and GRP, a glass-fibre laminate, at 25 to 40. BS 6229:2025 keeps a minimum finished fall of 1:80 for a flat roof, and a designer aims for about 1:40 so that the finished surface clears itself. A garage roof that keeps a puddle after rain has lost its fall or sagged. Checkatrade puts re-felting a garage roof at around £1,000 to £2,000, with an average of £1,500, as a typical UK figure and not a price for your garage. Our flat roofing page lists the coverings.

3.2 When a new flat roof must meet Part L

Approved Document L treats a fresh waterproofing layer over a flat deck as renovation. Where more than 50 per cent of that roof's surface is renovated and its U-value is worse than 0.35 W/(m²·K), Table 4.3 of the 2021 edition asks for it to be improved to 0.16, and the 2026 edition, which takes effect on 24 March 2027, keeps those figures in Table 3.3. In plain terms that usually means insulation goes in as the new covering goes on, so it is better planned than discovered halfway through the job. Your building control body can confirm what applies to your roof.

3.3 Older garages and asbestos

HSE advice for older buildings, meaning anything built or refurbished before the year 2000, is to proceed as though asbestos is present. A garage roof of corrugated sheet from the 1970s could be asbestos cement, and those sheets are fragile, so nobody should step onto one. Lifting intact sheets with care falls outside the licensing regime, but should the sheets crumble badly the job turns notifiable, and its waste needs a hazardous consignment note. We ask for a sample test before we plan the job.