Builders and roofers in Blandford Forum
Roofing, brickwork and repointing, plastering and rendering, insulation, driveways and exterior cleaning across Blandford Forum, Blandford St Mary and Bryanston. A town rebuilt in brick and tile by Act of Parliament, and it still shows.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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Blandford Forum
The one town in Dorset where the roof covering was set by statute
Blandford burned on 4 June 1731, and Parliament decided what went back on the roofs. The Blandford Forum (Rebuilding After the Fire) Act, passed the following year, required the town to be rebuilt in brick and tile. That is why a county known for thatch has a brick-and-tile market town at its centre, and it is still the starting point for any repair in the conservation area.
If water is coming into a Blandford house right now, ring 07435 839745 and tell us the street and which room, and leave the question of matching the tile until it is dry.
The fire started at about two in the afternoon at the junction of White Cliff Mill Street and Bryanston Street. A north-westerly wind carried it through the town inside an hour.
The conservation area appraisal records one detail that matters more to a roofer than anything else in the account: "tiled houses lasted longer than thatched but even so, by 7pm few houses were left standing." The eastern end of East Street came through it, and the reason is instructive. That stretch had already burned in 1713 and had been rebuilt in brick and tile. It survived the second fire because of what it was made of.
The monument John Bastard put up in 1760 records that fourteen inhabitants died and four hundred families lost their homes. He and his brother William then rebuilt Blandford Forum, and the work was largely finished inside thirty years. They kept the medieval street plan and the burgage plots and simply rebuilt on them, which is why the centre reads as a single Georgian piece, not a street that grew.
The practical consequence is that substitution shows here in a way it does not in a town that evolved. Put a concrete interlocking tile on a Georgian frontage in the Market Place and it is obvious from across the road, because everything either side of it went up in the same decade to the same specification.
Materials
Clay tile is the tradition here. Slate arrived with the railway
If you are matching a Blandford roof, the age of the covering tells you which century you are working in. Clay plain tile is the post-fire tradition. Natural slate is described in the conservation area appraisal as a later nineteenth-century import, and it arrives with the railway: Blandford St Mary station opened on 1 November 1860 and Blandford Forum on 31 August 1863.
So a slate roof in Blandford Forum is, in practice, post-railway. A clay tile roof is older. That is a useful thing to know before anyone orders material, because "matching what is there" means different things on the two.
What catches people out in Blandford Forum
- Mathematical tiles. There are elevations in Salisbury Street, and at Artisan House in East Street, clad in mathematical tiles hung on a timber frame to imitate brickwork. They look like brick and they are not. They are a cladding, they are rare, and they need treating as a hung finish, not as masonry.
- Painted false jointing. Many facades still carry traces of false brick jointing painted on in white over a coloured wall face, sometimes not lining up with the real joints underneath. A careless repoint or a pressure wash takes it off permanently, and it cannot be put back.
- Cast iron rainwater goods are the conservation area norm, and the appraisal is blunt that most of the damage it found came from unmaintained rainwater goods, not from anything structural.
Dorset Council's guidance asks that new work take its reference from the host building, that bonds, mortar and pointing style be matched, and that conservation-pattern rooflights are used on anything predating the mid twentieth century. Its position on plastic is not ambiguous.
Worth knowing before you book
Blandford has a bat problem no other town on this site has
Bats are the single most useful thing we can tell you about roof and loft work in Blandford, and almost nobody mentions them until they hold a job up.
Bryanston, immediately west of the town, is an important roost for the greater horseshoe bat, and it is protected for that reason. Bat roosts are protected in law as well, whoever owns the building.
Dorset Council applies a consultation zone around it, and proposals closest to the roost can require full season surveys, and a full season means what it says. The town centre is roughly one to two kilometres from Bryanston, so much of Blandford Forum is close enough to be asked the question.
In practice that matters for anything that opens up a roof space in Blandford Forum. It does not mean you cannot have your roof done. It means the survey window can dictate the start date, and that is worth knowing in January instead of finding out in May. We will tell you if we think your address is likely to be caught, and we will not pretend the timing is our doing.
The other Blandford
Most of the town is not Georgian. It went up from the 1970s into the 2000s
About two in three homes in Blandford Forum were built between 1945 and 2008, and the largest single slice, close to one in five, went up between 1973 and 1982. Only about one in five is older than 1919. The earliest of the newer estates are now forty years old and more, and many were roofed to the same specification within a few years of each other.
That produces the same effect as in Ferndown, for a different reason. When a whole cohort of houses is built together, it does not fail one at a time over a century. It arrives at the same point together: mortar bedding cracking off ridges and verges, sarking felt sagging and splitting where it laps into the gutter, plastic dry-verge caps gone brittle in the sun.
None of that is a new roof. It is edge work, and it is far cheaper than the re-roof people assume they are being sold. We will tell you plainly when a covering has years left in it.
| Part of town | Typical fabric | What usually needs doing | What governs it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Georgian core | Brick and clay tile, some slate, mathematical tiles in places | Matched tile repair, leadwork, lime repointing, cast iron rainwater goods | Listed building consent and conservation area control |
| Victorian and inter-war | Brick with slate or clay tile, bay-fronted and detached | Slate repair, chimney and flashing work, render repair | Conservation area in parts, otherwise permitted development |
| 1970s to 2000s estates | Concrete interlocking tile, mortar-bedded ridge and verge | Dry-fix ridge and verge, sarking felt at the eaves, dry-verge caps | Nothing special, but the bat zone still applies |
Ground and water
Chalk under the town, and a rule that only bites on one side of it
The bedrock under Blandford Forum is chalk, with alluvium along the Stour and clay-with-flints up on the downs. There is no London Clay and no Lambeth Group here, so the shrink-swell subsidence story that dominates a lot of southern England is not the local issue. What you get instead is a principal aquifer that drains through fractures, compressible ground in the valley, and dissolution pipes in the chalk under the clay-with-flints, anywhere from a metre to fifty across.
That aquifer creates a rule worth knowing before you price a driveway in Blandford Forum. The town centre is not in a groundwater source protection zone, but the north-east side of town is, including the innermost zone, with the boundary falling roughly a mile and a half north-east of the Market Place.
The Environment Agency's position is specific and it splits cleanly. Clean roof water to ground is acceptable even in the inner zone, with no permit needed, provided the downpipes are sealed against pollutants. Anything else in that zone, which includes driveway and yard drainage, wants a hydrogeological risk assessment first, and the agency will object to infiltration without one.
So on the north-east side, a roof soakaway is straightforward and a driveway soakaway is a conversation. We will tell you which side of that line your address falls before we quote the drainage, not after.
The Stour
The floods people remember are the ones the defences were built to stop
Blandford Forum flooded badly in 1979, and the town museum records boats being paddled through the Market Place. That is what triggered the defences, which the Environment Agency records as built in 1986 and 1992: something over seven hundred metres of wall, close to six hundred metres of embankment, two flood gates and a pumping station on the Pimperne Brook, giving protection to a one per cent annual probability flood.
They changed the picture, and the agency's own recorded flood outlines show it. The 1979 outlines reach West Street, River Mews, Barnack Walk and Nightingale Court. The outlines for 2009, the winter of 2013 into 2014, and October 2021 stay in the open floodplain and touch none of the town-centre streets.
Anyone owning property in Blandford Forum should read the flood map and the warning area with care. Flood zones are published ignoring defences, so land behind the wall still maps as zone three even though it is protected, and that affects what a surveyor or an insurer says rather than what actually happens. And the Market Place itself is in zone two, not zone three, while still sitting inside the Environment Agency's flood warning area for the middle Stour. Those are three separate facts and they get merged constantly.
What we do in Blandford
The trades this town actually needs
Blandford needs brickwork and lime repointing first, then roofing, driveways and patios, and plastering, rendering and insulation, in that order, because this is a brick town first.
Bricklaying and repointing
The town is brick because the Act said so, and the historic core is soft brick in lime with vitrified headers and painted false jointing on some elevations. That wants lime mortar, hand raking and a matched joint profile, not a grinder and a bag of cement. Garden and boundary walls in Blandford Forum are often greensand with brick or stone piers, and the greensand was carted in from elsewhere, not quarried locally.
Brickwork and repointingRoofing
Roofing in Blandford Forum depends on which side of the conservation area boundary you are. Matched clay tile, slate and leadwork in the conservation area, where the covering is part of a listed or protected frontage. Dry ridge, verge and eaves work on the 1980s estates, where the tile is fine and the mortar and the felt are not.
Roofing servicesDriveways and patios
Permeable surfacing is policy, not just preference inside the conservation area, and on the north-east side of town the aquifer decides how the drainage is built. Chalk usually takes infiltration well, which is a genuine advantage, provided the design is the right one for the zone you are in.
Driveways and patiosPlastering, rendering and insulation
Solid-walled Georgian property needs to breathe, so a modern gypsum skim over a wall that is still damp will blow again. Render on the historic frontages is limited by what the appraisal will accept. On the 1980s stock it is the opposite problem: cavity walls, thin loft insulation settled under forty years of storage, and an easy win.
Loft and wall insulationWe also clean roofs, render and paving, and there is a local wrinkle to that as well. Cranborne Chase is an International Dark Sky Reserve, designated in 2019, so external lighting on the north and east side of town gets more scrutiny than it would elsewhere. Worth remembering if a driveway job comes with floodlights attached.
Reviews
What customers said
A roof and a driveway and patio job, written by the customers afterwards. The roofing customer mentions being kept informed and a site left tidy; the other describes a resin driveway, patio and decking area on a complex job.
… The team were professional, friendly and kept me informed throughout the whole job. The workmanship was excellent, everything was completed to a high standard, and they left the site clean and tidy afterwards. …
Bournemouth Roofing and Building completed a beautiful resin driveway, patio, and decking area for us. The job was quite complex and far from straightforward, but they handled everything with professionalism and skill. ……
Free quote
How do you get a free quote in Blandford Forum?
Send the form or ring 07435 839745. Thomas Hannen comes out to Blandford Forum, looks at the job and puts an itemised price in writing, and neither the visit nor the written quote costs anything.
Our base is at 80a Wolverton Road, Boscombe, Bournemouth BH7 6HX. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Blandford Forum?
Most repairs in Blandford Forum need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.
| Question | In Blandford Forum |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Blandford Forum. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | Yes: Blandford Forum and Approaches Conservation Area and Blandford St Mary and Bryanston Conservation Area. They cover parts of Blandford Forum, so check whether your street is inside one. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Blandford Forum. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Blandford Forum. |
Questions
Questions about building work in Blandford
Is Blandford in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty?
No, and this one gets stated wrongly a lot. The town sits in the gap between two of them. Dorset National Landscape starts roughly four hundred metres to the west and south-west, and Cranborne Chase roughly six hundred and sixty metres to the north and east, but the town itself is outside both.
The parish clips Cranborne Chase on its undeveloped fringe only. AONBs were renamed National Landscapes in November 2023, though the designation and its legal effect did not change. What does bite on work in the town centre is listed building consent and conservation area control, not AONB policy.
Is there an Article 4 Direction in the conservation area?
No, we checked this three ways, against the national planning data, against Dorset Council's own published register of Article 4 directions, and against the council's conservation pages. Milton Abbas and Iwerne Minster both have one. Blandford does not. That means ordinary householder permitted development rights, already restricted inside any conservation area, are not further withdrawn here for windows, doors, roof coverings, rainwater goods or hard surfacing. Listed building consent, demolition control and the six-week tree notification all still apply. The appraisal does say the council will consider a direction if cumulative change starts harming the area, so it is worth not being the reason they do.
My house is on one of the 1980s estates. Does it really need a new roof?
Usually not: concrete interlocking tiles have a long service life, and a roof from that decade is normally middle-aged, not finished. What wears out first is everything that is not the tile: the mortar bedding the ridge and the verge, the sarking felt where it sags and tears at the eaves, the flashing round a chimney or a soil vent, and plastic dry-verge caps that have gone brittle. Those are repairs. We would far rather quote you for the repair than sell you a re-roof you do not need, and we will put photographs of what we found with the quote.
Will bats hold up my roof job?
They might affect the timing, and it is better to know early. Bryanston, just west of the town, is an important greater horseshoe bat roost. Dorset Council applies a consultation zone around it, and work closest to the roost can require a full season survey. The town centre is only a kilometre or two from Bryanston. It does not stop the work. It can move when the work starts, so raise it with us at the survey rather than the week you want the scaffold up.
Can I put a soakaway in for a new driveway?
On most of Blandford Forum, yes, and chalk usually takes infiltration well. On the north-east side it is more involved, because that part of town sits in a groundwater source protection zone including the innermost band, with the boundary about a mile and a half north-east of the Market Place. The Environment Agency's position is that clean roof water to ground is fine even there, with sealed downpipes and no permit. Driveway and yard drainage in that zone is different and wants a hydrogeological risk assessment first. We will establish which side of that line you are on before pricing the drainage.
Was Blandford not a thatched town?
The opposite, and it is deliberate. The Act that governed the rebuilding after the 1731 fire required brick and tile, which effectively legislated thatch out of the town centre. Thatch in this part of Dorset belongs to the surrounding villages, most famously Milton Abbas about five miles south-west, which is a conservation area of thatched cob cottages laid out in the 1770s and which does have an Article 4 Direction. If you have a thatched property out in the villages we will point you at a thatcher instead of pretending otherwise.
We cover Blandford Forum, Blandford St Mary and Bryanston, and out to Pimperne, Charlton Marshall, Stourpaine, Durweston and Spetisbury, across the DT11 postcodes. Blandford comes under Dorset Council. Worth knowing that DT11 is a large outcode: the town is DT11 7, Blandford Camp and Pimperne are DT11 8, and Blandford St Mary and Charlton Marshall are DT11 9, so the postcode on its own does not tell you which parish you are in.
Trade by trade
Each trade, written for Blandford Forum
The same local evidence, read through each trade in turn. Ground conditions decide a driveway, exposure decides a roof, and the age of the housing decides insulation.
- Roofing in Blandford Forum
- Flat roofing in Blandford Forum
- Bricklaying and repointing in Blandford Forum
- Repointing in Blandford Forum
- Driveways and patios in Blandford Forum
- Patios in Blandford Forum
- Plastering and rendering in Blandford Forum
- Rendering in Blandford Forum
- Insulation in Blandford Forum
- Loft insulation in Blandford Forum
- Wall insulation in Blandford Forum
- Exterior cleaning in Blandford Forum
- Gutter cleaning in Blandford Forum
- Fascias, soffits and guttering in Blandford Forum
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We work in Blandford Forum, Blandford St Mary and Bryanston, and out to Pimperne, Charlton Marshall, Stourpaine, Durweston and Spetisbury. All of it is DT11 and all of it is Dorset Council.
You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. That takes a minute to check. Thomas Hannen owns the firm and he prices every Blandford Forum job himself, so the person who quotes it is the person answerable for it. One written itemised quote covers every trade on the job.
There is a verified customer's 10 out of 10 on our Checkatrade profile. The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent in Blandford Forum, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.
Free quote
Get a price for your Blandford property
Tell us the street and what it is doing. If it is listed or in the conservation area, say so, and we will price the matched option properly rather than the cheap one.