Roofers in Sandwich

On Strand Street and the streets around it you're working on buildings that predate almost everything a modern roofer normally encounters. Timber frames have moved and settled over centuries, so ridges undulate, planes twist, and what looks like a simple pitched roof from the street turns out to be three different roofs joined together at odd angles.

Clay peg tiles are common, hung on oak pegs rather than nailed, and often the originals are worth salvaging and re-laying. Where tiles need making up, they need matching — both because a modern tile looks obviously wrong on a medieval roof, and because listed building consent generally requires it. This isn't work to hurry, and it isn't work for someone who has only ever laid concrete interlocking tiles.

Valleys and junctions are where Sandwich roofs leak. With so many roof planes meeting at irregular angles, there are a great many junctions, and each one is a potential entry point. Historic lead work in these valleys has usually been repaired several times over, sometimes badly, and water can travel a considerable distance through an old timber frame before it appears on a ceiling. Finding the actual source is often most of the job.

Out at Sandwich Bay and the villages the picture is more conventional — larger properties, better access, and the usual flat roofs on extensions and outbuildings.

Valleys are the single most relevant piece of work we can show anyone with an older Sandwich property, because that's where these roofs fail.

A valley is where two roof planes meet, and it carries the water off both of them. That makes it the busiest and most vulnerable detail on the whole roof. On an old building with an irregular frame, forming one properly means working with the shape the building has actually settled into rather than the shape it was meant to have.

Our write-up covers what's involved in taking one apart and putting it back so it stays watertight. It's slow, careful work, and it's the sort of detail that separates a roof that lasts from one that leaks again in two winters.