Roofers in Southwick

The Baptist chapel on Wynsome Street was rebuilt in 1815 in red brick with stone dressings, under a slate roof. It is a useful model because it combines three materials that each age at a different pace. Brick takes a long run of weather before it shows it. Stone dressings, the carved blocks round openings and at corners, are softer and wear faster. Slate lasts longest of all but is only as secure as the nails that hold it.

Where those materials meet, trouble starts. The roof meets a gable wall at the verge, a stack at a flashing, and a window or door head at an abutment, and every one of those junctions leans on lead or mortar. On a roof like this we start our inspection at those joins. A slate itself may be perfect, while the lead beneath it has split from years of expansion and contraction.

Slate comes in many sizes, thicknesses and colours, and a good repair respects that. Offcuts of slightly different grades look wrong beside original ones, so we source slate to match the roof in front of us, reclaiming where possible. In a village like this, with a mix of ages, a single bad patch is easy to spot from the road and from the path across the Country Park.

A full re-slate is worth considering when slipped slates appear across every slope and the battens beneath are soft. In that case, the sound slate is stripped, sorted, and relaid on new battens with a new underlay, so the roof keeps its character and gets a fresh structure underneath. For roofs where only a few slates have moved, a targeted repair is cheaper and kinder. More on slate repair and re-slating sits under slate roofing.

St Thomas's, the parish church, dates from 1899 to 1904 and is a C.E. Ponting design in rock-faced limestone. Its tower is topped by a shingled flèche, and a flèche is a slender spirelet, usually timber framed and covered with small overlapping units. On a tower it is the most exposed roof in the village, with nothing above it to break the wind.

Small high roofs like this are demanding in particular ways. The covering is cut in small pieces and laid in close overlapping courses, so each unit has to be fixed well. The base of the spirelet, where it rises from the tower roof, is a joint that must shed water in every direction, and lead flashing dressed round it does that job. Access is harder too: scaffold or a specialist platform is needed, which often accounts for a large part of the cost.

The same ideas apply to any tall feature on an older building, such as a bell turret, a cupola or a finial. We check the fixings, the lead at the base and the timber underneath before judging the covering, because a timber frame that has taken in water can look fine from the ground. Lead needs particular care. Rolled lead sheet expands and contracts with temperature, so it has to be cut into sections and dressed with allowance for movement. A large sheet nailed down rigidly will crack along its length within a few seasons.

Permission complicates any church job: St Thomas's is a working parish church of the Church of England, so the diocese grants a faculty in place of listed building consent, and a change that materially alters its outside can still need planning permission from the council. Our lead roofing page describes how the metal is detailed. For a church, hall or school roof, we write the findings in a form the parochial church council or trustees can use at a meeting.