Roofers in West Wittering

The council's character appraisal for West Wittering names the materials that run through the conservation area: flint and red brick for the walls, clay tiles or thatch for the roofs, and a handful of slate roofs that probably arrived by railway after the middle of the 19th century. That describes the conservation area, not every street in the parish, and we treat it that way. Inside the boundary a roof is part of how the village reads from the lane, which is why the covering you pick matters as much as the repair itself. Matching clay is usually the right call here. A cheaper substitute that looks different from the road, in tone or in surface, rarely earns its place.

1.1 How long clay tile lasts

Clay is the covering we expect on older houses here. Marley gives the Building Research Establishment's minimum life expectancy of 60 years for clay tile. On old peg-tile roofs a building conservation article cautions that this number is no dependable yardstick, because a good handmade tile can outlast it and a poor one can give up sooner. In practice the tile is seldom what goes first. It is the nail or peg holding it. We start in the loft and study the underside of the slope, since daylight showing through, damp battens (the thin timber strips each course hangs from) and tiles resting on nothing tell us more than any view from the ground. Our pitched roofing page describes the way a tiled slope is stripped and laid again.

1.2 The church and the lanes around it

St Peter and St Paul's is listed Grade I, keeps 11th-century fabric and is built of rubble, part flint and part beach boulders, under a tiled roof. A working Anglican church takes the faculty route for its own repairs. Cottages near it are a different matter. Where one is listed, altering its character needs listed building consent, while a straight repair in the same material is a lighter question. We look up the entry before pricing and tell you whether the council should hear about the job before scaffold goes up.

1.3 Thatch beside tile

Thatch appears in the same appraisal alongside the clay. A thatcher repairs and renews thatch, so our work next to it is the lead where tile meets a flint wall, the gutters, and the valley, which is the inside angle where two slopes run together. Each junction is photographed during the survey, and the pictures can go to the thatcher if you need them to.

West Wittering has older buildings than its seaside reputation suggests. Cakeham Manor was a favourite residence of the Bishops of Chichester from the early 12th century, and Bishop Sherburne restored and enlarged it early in the 16th. Houses in the conservation area, with its extension along Elms Lane, carry that long history, and an old roof there has usually been mended piece by piece across generations. Age is not the same as failure. A roof with a few patched corners can have years left, and when it does, our verdict is to repair it and leave it alone.

3.1 Listed houses and the council

Chichester District Council is the planning authority in West Wittering and runs building control too. If a house is listed, ask the council before work that would change its character, and expect to be asked about the existing covering. Whether an Article 4 direction removes roof rights in this village is a question for Chichester District Council's planning team, so ask them before assuming anything either way. Our skylight planning permission guide deals with the roof window side of that discussion.

3.2 Re-roofing, weight and the scaffold

According to the Planning Portal, a re-cover touching under 25 per cent of the building envelope and under 50 per cent of the roof normally needs no building control application. A covering roughly 15 per cent heavier or more changes that, and a structural check comes first. Putting scaffold up on a narrow Wittering lane calls for a licence, which West Sussex County Council grants as the highway authority. The council asks for at least 10 working days of notice. Before touching an old roof we also look for signs of bats and nesting birds, since both are protected, and we plan the dates around anything we find.

3.3 What the survey includes

Photographs of the slope, ridge, valleys and lead go to you with the written quote. They show the fault in place, so the repair or replace verdict can be checked against the picture rather than taken on trust. If a tile has cracked from a frost, a stray ball or a branch, the photograph shows that too, and a small repair is then the whole job. Where the pictures show damp timbers or a sagging line, the verdict follows from that, and the access and time the next step needs are explained before you agree to anything. A shore-side roof that has been left for years may also have moss or algae on the slope, and that is cleared before we judge the tiles beneath.