Roofers in Chipping Sodbury

In the centre of an old market town, buildings are close together and often serve more than one purpose. A property might have a shop or office at street level and a home above, or sit as part of a terrace whose roof runs over several owners. The roof you see from the pavement is the front slope. The rest may be a rear pitch, a flat extension and a run of gutters that nobody has looked at together.

Shared roofs need a clear scope. If a valley or a party-wall flashing leaks, the cause may belong to the neighbour's side, and a repair to one half will not cure it. We survey the whole line where we can reach it, report on which parts belong to your building, and explain where the work stops. That is useful to a managing agent, a landlord or a freeholder who needs a single document to circulate.

Access is the practical limit. A High Street building may have no rear lane, which means scaffold on the pavement, a licence from the highway authority and careful timing around deliveries and customers. We plan those details at the survey and tell you what permissions are needed, so there are no surprises on the first morning.

Commercial roofs are priced on survey. The covering, the access, the insulation, the edge details and the drainage all vary, and a quote from the road would be a guess. Our commercial roofing service sets out the systems we work with, and any low-slope section behind a frontage is dealt with under flat roofing.

If you manage a property with several tenants, ask for the report in a form you can pass on. A clear list of defects, in order of urgency, with photographs, makes decisions between owners much quicker.

The Chipping Sodbury Tunnel, opened in 1902 and running under the Cotswolds, is notorious for flooding in wet weather. It has nothing to do with your roof, but it makes a useful point. Rain that falls on a hill has to go somewhere, and when the route is blocked or too small, it finds another. On a building, that other route is usually through the wall, the ceiling or the foundation.

The roof's drainage has four parts. Gutters collect the water at the eaves. Outlets pass it into downpipes. Downpipes carry it to the ground. A drain or soakaway takes it away. If any one is wrong, the others fail with it. A gutter fitted without enough fall holds a pool and overflows at the back. A downpipe with a blocked bend backs up in a downpour. A box gutter between two roofs can overflow into the building if its outlet is smaller than the water it receives.

We check each part. We look for stained walls below the gutter line, for green growth in the joints, for brackets that have pulled away and for outlets choked with leaves. Where a section is damaged or the fall is wrong, we replace it. Where the whole run has aged, it is often cheaper to renew it than to keep mending joints. As a yardstick only, MyBuilder (2026) reports typical UK guttering costs of £30 to £70 a metre, scaffold extra on taller buildings. What you pay is fixed after we have surveyed.

Choice of material matters too: plastic, aluminium and cast iron each suit different buildings, and an old building often looks best with the material it started with. The choices are laid out under gutters, soffits and fascias.

Do not wait for a flood to test the system. After a long dry spell, one clear look at the outlets, and a bucket of water along the gutter, shows whether it is ready for autumn.