Roofers in Faversham

Faversham has one of the largest concentrations of listed buildings of any town its size in the country, and that fundamentally changes how a roof gets repaired. What comes off has to go back on, or be matched. Kent peg tiles — handmade clay tiles hung on pegs — are the traditional covering across this part of Kent, and they're still the right answer on the older buildings. Where tiles have broken beyond saving, they need replacing with reclaimed peg tiles of a matching colour and size rather than anything modern.

The roof structures behind them are typically steep, which is good news for shedding water, and irregular, which is less good news for everything else. Centuries of extensions and alterations leave a lot of junctions, valleys and abutments, and those are almost always where the water gets in.

Faversham sits inland at the head of a creek rather than on the open coast, so salt exposure is much lower than we deal with in Thanet. What replaces it is vegetation. There's substantial tree cover across the town and the surrounding villages, which means gutters and valleys filling with leaves every autumn, moss and lichen holding damp against the tiles, and overhanging branches lifting and breaking them in high wind. Regular gutter and valley clearing does more good on a Faversham roof than almost any other maintenance.

Outside the historic core it's more familiar — Victorian terraces, inter-war and modern housing, and flat-roofed extensions and garages.

Our published work is Thanet-side rather than Faversham — we'd rather be straight about that — but this write-up is the best illustration of how we approach a full re-roof anywhere.

We stripped the roof back, fitted a breathable membrane, dealt with the timber, re-tiled, rebuilt the ridges and sorted the lead detailing, and tied in a flat-roof dormer and a new roof window so the flat and pitched elements met cleanly.

The materials would be different on a Faversham peg-tile roof. The method — strip it, look at what's underneath, fix what needs fixing, then build it back properly — is exactly the same.