Roofers in Deal

The Middle Street conservation area and the seafront terraces define roofing in Deal. Georgian townhouses of this kind typically have a parapet wall across the front, with the roof hidden behind it and the rainwater collected in a box or parapet gutter running along the back of that wall. It's an elegant solution and a permanent liability. The gutter is out of sight, it's lead-lined, it fills with debris, and when it fails the water has nowhere to go but into the wall or down inside the building. By the time anyone notices, it has usually been happening for a while.

Many of these roofs are mansards or shallow-pitched slate hidden behind the parapet, often with the original slate and often with fixings well past their working life. A good number are listed or in the conservation area, so replacement materials have to match.

Then there's the exposure. Deal faces east into the Channel across an open shingle beach with no natural shelter whatsoever. Salt-laden wind hits the front of these buildings constantly, and the chimney stacks — tall, exposed and often shared between properties — take the worst of it. Failed flaunching and eroded pointing on a Deal stack is one of the most common causes of an unexplained damp patch on a top-floor ceiling.

Away from the front, Walmer and the newer parts of town are more conventional: Victorian and inter-war housing, concrete and clay tile, and the flat-roofed extensions and garages we fit fibreglass to everywhere.

Deal has a great many tall, exposed chimney stacks, so this is a job worth understanding.

Flaunching is the sloped mortar bed at the top of a stack that holds the pots and throws water clear. It's the most weather-beaten part of the whole roof, and when it cracks — which it always eventually does — water runs straight down inside the stack and into the brickwork. From the ground you'd see nothing at all.

Our write-up shows what proper flaunching involves and why patching a cracked one rarely lasts. On an exposed Channel-facing stack it's the difference between a repair that holds for decades and one that fails next winter.