Roofing in Lyndhurst

A valley here is built, not fitted. Much of the village went up before the First World War, and a steep plain tiled roof of that age is held together by its hips, valleys and verges, not 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 from a dry ridge and dry verge system, or from 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 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. If it is one slipped slate, a cracked valley tile or a single leak at the stack, roof repairs in Lyndhurst covers mending that fault and leaving the rest of the roof alone. 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. Where a building has been split into flats, on the 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.

We will not price an old roof by the square metre. On a Lyndhurst house, what it is covered in and how that was fixed decide far more than the size.

The covering. A slated Victorian villa can usually be stripped and rehung using most of its own slate, topped up with a close match. A cottage in clay plain tiles has hundreds of small tiles to every slope, each one nailed and lapped, and that is slow. Changing either to concrete alters the look of the house, which inside the National Park makes it a planning question.

Nails, battens and what is under them. On many old slate roofs it is the nails that have rusted away, not the slate. Where slipping is widespread, the battens have usually gone too, and the job becomes a full strip and relay to BS 5534 with a new breathable membrane.

Lead. Chimneys, valleys, dormer cheeks and abutments are each priced separately, and on an older house some of that lead may be original and past saving.

Where the scaffold can stand. On the main street it needs a licence and usually a covered walkway. Out towards the open forest, materials are fenced or kept up on the scaffold, away from the animals. The work at height rules make the platform a separate line.

Ask any other roofer whether your slates are being reused, whether the battens and membrane are new, and whether the scaffold and licence are in the price.

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.

Most repairs in Lyndhurst 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.