Roofing in Lyndhurst

A valley here is built, not fitted. Two in five dwellings in the village predate 1919, and a steep plain tiled roof of that age is held together by its hips, valleys and verges rather than by its field. Bonnet hips are bedded and pointed one at a time and crack in sequence once the mortar has gone. Swept and laced valleys are built out of cut tile rather than dropped in as a trough, so a valley repair here means rebuilding a piece of roof, not fitting a part. We match the camber and colour of a weathered tile from stock sorted by hand, and lay a sample out at ground level first. A good deal of the decorative work on these buildings is roofing work as well: tile hung gables and dormer cheeks on battens, ornamental ridge and the odd finial. It is repairable, and the fixings behind it are usually the fault rather than the tile in front, so a decorative course is photographed and numbered before it comes off.

Chimneys and leadwork. Tall stacks with two or three flues are where most of the water gets in. Flashings, soakers stepped into the brickwork, back gutters and abutments in code rated lead, cut into lengths short enough to move without splitting, with the flaunching renewed on top while the scaffold is there. Behind a parapet it is often a secret gutter, a lead lined channel with no room for error. The mechanical fixing BS 5534 asks for can be had two ways: a dry ridge and dry verge system, or a renewed mortar bedding in a lime mix over a proper fixing. Where a roof is seen from the street in the conservation area we usually take the second route, because a plastic dry verge edge on a Victorian gable is the change everyone notices. On the post-war houses off the main road, where the covering is concrete interlocking tile, the dry fix system is the obvious answer and we say so.

On a steep roof water runs a long way along a rafter or purlin before it drops, so the stain and the hole are rarely above one another and we work from the loft outwards. When nails, battens and underlay have gone together a re-cover goes back on treated battens and breathable membrane with sarking and rafter feet replaced, but a new roof here is a last answer, not a first one. Dormer tops, rear additions and garages in felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber, with the deck checked before the falls, upstands and outlet. Cast iron gutters, downpipes, fascias and soffits repaired where they are worth repairing, and moss cleared off the shaded slopes by hand. Nearly a quarter of the dwellings are flats, so on a communal roof it is the freeholder or the managing agent who instructs the work. While a covering is off, insulation and eaves ventilation are dealt with to the standard Approved Document L sets, which costs a fraction of doing it later.

The main street carries heavy traffic on a narrow footway, so a scaffold that stands on the highway needs a licence and often a pedestrian route around it, which we arrange and price rather than spring on you. Out on the open forest edge it is the opposite problem: nothing gets stacked on a verge where stock roam, so materials are penned or kept on the scaffold. How long a platform stands matters as much as its size, and the work at height rules are why it is a line of its own. Ask whether the scaffold is in the quote and who takes the old tiles away.

Lyndhurst sits inside the New Forest National Park and has its own conservation area, so the body that decides a roof application here is the National Park Authority rather than a district council. For a like for like repair that changes nothing at all and there is nothing to apply for. For anything that changes what the roof looks like, it changes both who you ask and what they will ask you for, because the National Park sets out what it protects on grounds of appearance in the landscape as well as heritage.

What that means in practice is that a change of covering, a new dormer, or a rooflight on a slope that faces a street is worth checking before you commit to a quote rather than after. It also means the useful quote is the specific one. A price that names the tile, the ridge detail and the lead code is a document you can put in front of an officer. A price that says renew as existing is not.