Roofers in Stoughton

Stoughton is a large parish of 5,373 acres, and the village itself stands in the valley made by the River Ems, below Bow Hill, which rises to over 600 feet inside the parish boundary. The county history, published in 1953, describes a village of flint and brick, with nothing earlier than the 18th century apart from an L-shaped house whose walls are red and black brick. That is a picture painted more than seventy years ago. Individual roofs will have been re-covered more than once since, so we look at what is on your house today rather than at what the book says. A parish this size also means real distances between houses, so we plan a visit around the survey, the photographs and the questions you want answered, not around a rush to the next job.

1.1 Chimney shafts that have outlived their roofs

The L-shaped house keeps its 17th-century chimney-shafts, and that detail says something useful about stacks in general. A stack of that age has seen several roofs come and go. What fails first is seldom the brick. It is the flaunching, the sloped mortar cap that seats the pots, the pointing between the courses, and the flashing round the foot of the stack, where a strip of lead meets old masonry. Water gets in there, trickles down inside the chimney breast and appears as a damp brown patch on a bedroom wall, well away from the roof itself. Our chimney repairs page walks through repointing, re-flaunching and reflashing a stack.

1.2 Fixing ridges and hips to current practice

On the pitched roofs between the stacks, the ridge (the capping along the apex) and the hips (the angled lines that slope from the ridge towards the eaves on the corners of a hipped roof) are where older work shows its age. BS 5534, as revised in 2014, treats a bed of mortar as insufficient by itself, so ridge and hip tiles also get clips or screws. A ridge bedded in mortar decades ago and untouched since may still be sound, or it may be rocking in its bed. We test it by hand from the ladder and photograph anything loose. If the ridge needs rebedding, we bed it and fix it, and if the rest of the slope is in good order we leave it alone and say so in the written quote, which carries one total price.

Stansted Park lies in the west of the parish. James Wyatt's house of 1786 was largely destroyed by fire in 1900, and what stands there now is a red brick house with white stone dressings by Sir Reginald Blomfield. We do not work on the house, and its roofs belong to the estate. They still make a good illustration of what a large country roof involves, because houses of this class share the same weak points: long runs of lead, valleys between ranges, and gutters that sit behind a parapet where a leak can run for weeks before anyone sees it. A smaller house on the Downs has the same points in miniature, over a bay window, a porch or a rear extension, and the same rule applies to each: find where the water goes, then look at that spot first. On a flat-roofed extension behind an older house, the junction with the main wall is the place to start, and the edge trim is the second.

3.1 Parapet gutters, valleys and lead

A parapet gutter is a lead-lined channel set behind a low wall at the edge of the roof, and a valley is the channel where two slopes meet. Both carry a lot of water, and both depend on lead laid in lengths with joints that allow for movement. When we survey a roof with either, we photograph the outlet first, because a blocked outlet turns a good gutter into a leak. Our lead roofing and leadwork page shows the codes and laps we use, and how thick the lead should be for each detail.

3.2 Scaffold on a narrow lane, and who decides

Where a lane is narrow, a tall house may need scaffold that stands on the highway. That calls for a highway licence, issued by West Sussex County Council, which asks for at least 10 working days' notice, with one month of scaffolding costing £266. On planning, Stoughton sits in the South Downs National Park, yet Chichester District Council handles applications for the Park Authority in this area, and building control rests with the district council too. Before you change any covering inside a conservation area, ask the council's planning team what your address needs, and send us the reply so the written quote matches it. Should the house be listed too, its entry tells us what the building's special interest is, and we price the repair around that.