Beacon Basingstoke Roofing

Roofers in Worting

Worting is 2.5 road miles west of Basingstoke, a suburb with an old core of flint walls, red brick, slate and clay tile, all inside a conservation area designated in 1982. We survey your roof with photographs, explain the faults in plain terms and put a fixed price in writing, whether the job is three slates or a full re-cover.

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A row of Victorian terraced houses with Welsh slate roofs and brick chimneys in Reading

Roofs we see in Worting

  • Brick chimney stack with clay pots

    Slate on timber frame and brick

    The council's appraisal of the Worting Conservation Area records slate as widely used for roofing, on the timber-framed buildings as much as the brick ones. Slate lasts a very long time, but the nails holding it do not. They rust through, or the slate cracks across the nail hole, and the slate creeps down the roof. Caught early, that is a small repair on the battens (the timber strips the slates hang from).

  • A Hampshire village cottage of flint and brick with a steep clay plain tile roof

    Clay tile on barns and church roofs

    Worting's clay roofs are steep and generous. The 18th-century barn at Scrapp's Hill Farm has five aisled bays under a sweeping hipped clay tile roof, and St Thomas of Canterbury Church, listed at Grade II, has a steep red tile roof over flint walls. Hips, ridges and the long rafter runs are where we expect to find movement on roofs of this kind.

  • 1930s semi-detached houses with hipped clay tile roofs and bay windows on a suburban road

    Brick and flint walls, lime joints

    Red brick with blue and vitrified headers, and flint walling from the 19th century, are the walls that the older Worting roofs meet. Where a roof stops against one of them, at a chimney, a gable or a parapet, the weathertight joint is a strip of lead let into the wall. Soft old brick and flint need lime mortar, not hard cement, and we choose repairs with that in mind.

2.5 road miles west of Basingstoke

Planning and building control in Worting

The borough council, Basingstoke and Deane, is both the planning authority and the building control body for Worting. The council designated the Worting Conservation Area in 1982 and publishes the conservation area appraisal, which is worth a read before roof work on an older house. It counts ten listed buildings in the area, all Grade II apart from Worting House, which is Grade II*, and it names the materials that give the place its character: timber framing, red brick, flint, slate and clay tile.

Like-for-like repair, such as slate for slate or handmade clay tile for clay tile, is normally the straightforward route. Swapping the material or altering the look of a roof can need consent even when the house is not itself listed, so raise it with the borough's conservation team before a single tile is ordered. Our page on roof work in a conservation area explains how we approach it. Outside the old core, stripping and recovering most of a roof may have to be notified to the building control body, which is paperwork we handle. Planning a roof window? Our skylight planning answer sets out what applies.

Faults on Worting roofs, and the repairs

Fire devastated Worting in 1655, and the timber framing, brick and flint that make up its older buildings date from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Those buildings carry slate and clay tile, and roofs of that age have usually been repaired before. Alongside them stand later suburban houses with roofs of their own.

Chapter 1: Slates are creeping down the roof of our old Worting house. Can they be refixed?

What we find

A slate roof is held by two nails per slate, driven through holes near the top and hidden by the course above. On a roof that has stood for a century or more, those nails have corroded. The slate then drops a few centimetres and hangs by whatever is left of the shank, leaving a visible gap in the pattern of the roof. Slates can also snap across the nail hole when the wood beneath has dried and shrunk.

From the garden, a slipped slate shows as an uneven line or a dark patch of batten. In the loft you may see a pinprick of daylight, or a damp stain on a rafter below. In wind, loose slates become a danger to anyone walking underneath, so it is worth acting before the next gale.

What we fix

We rarely need to strip a whole slope. After lifting a few slates to check the battens, we refix the sound ones and replace only those that have cracked or lost their holes. Where a nail has failed we fit a copper or stainless fixing, and slates that cannot take another nail get a tingle, a small strip of lead or copper that holds the slate by its lower edge.

The slates are matched for size, thickness and colour, using reclaimed stock where we can. Typical UK figures reported for a single slate repair are £100 to £250 for labour and a further £5 to £25 for each slate, with £300 to £800 more if a scaffold tower is needed. The wider repair and re-roof choices are on our slate roofing page, and the number you pay is the one fixed after the survey.

Chapter 2: Is the sag in our clay tile roof on a Worting barn conversion a structural problem?

What we find

Large hipped clay roofs, like the one on the barn at Scrapp's Hill Farm, carry a lot of weight over long spans. Clay plain tiles are heavy, and a roof of that size may have been bearing on old oak and softwood timbers for two centuries. Over time, rafters can bow between their supports, purlins (the horizontal beams that carry the rafters) can deflect and joints can open. The roof surface then looks wavy, with tiles lifting at the high points.

A dip does not always mean trouble. Old roofs settle and then stop. What matters is whether the movement is still happening, and whether any timber is rotten where a leak has been feeding it. The places to check are the wall plate at the eaves and the foot of each hip rafter, where water collects.

What we fix

We start with a survey from the loft and the roof itself, photographing the timbers, measuring the dip against a string line and testing the ends of the rafters with a probe. If the timbers are sound and the movement is old, the tiles can be stripped, the battens renewed and the tiles relaid on a breathable underlay (the sheet that sits beneath the battens), leaving the shape of the roof alone.

Where a timber has rotted at its end, we cut out the damaged section and fix a new length alongside it, a repair called sistering. If the movement looks live, we say plainly that a structural engineer should see it before we quote for the covering. A re-cover on this scale may be notifiable, and the notification paperwork is ours to handle. Our pitched roofing page describes how these jobs run.

Chapter 3: Why does rain get in at the gable of our flint and brick house in Worting?

What we find

The verge is the edge of the roof where it finishes at a gable wall. On a Worting house of brick or flint, the tiles or slates usually run a short way past the wall and are sealed underneath with a bed of mortar. That mortar is exposed on three sides to weather, and over the years it shrinks, cracks and falls out in pieces.

Once the bed has gone, wind drives rain under the edge tiles and into the loft along the wall. The first signs are mortar crumbs on the ground below the gable, a tile at the verge that rocks when touched, or a stain high on the gable wall inside. Lime-pointed flint walls make it worse: if water runs down the face of the wall, it can wash out the pointing as well.

What we fix

We take back the verge to the first sound course, check the battens and the wall top beneath, and rebuild the edge. Under BS 5534 verge tiles need a mechanical fixing and cannot rely on mortar by itself, so we fit clip-on dry verge units or fixed tiles with a mortar finish that only fills the gap. On a house in the conservation area we match the colour of the tile and keep a mortar bed visible if that is how the roof was built.

Any repointing of the flint or brick below is done in lime so the wall can still breathe. Where a house has a poor verge on both sides, doing them together saves a second scaffold. The fixing methods and standards are laid out under ridge, verge and dry-fix systems.

Chapter 4: Do the ridge tiles on our later Worting house need replacing or just rebedding?

What we find

Not every Worting roof is old timber and flint. Plenty of houses outside the conservation area were built in the later suburban pattern, and their ridge tiles sit in sand and cement mortar laid when the house was new. That bed has now been through decades of frost and summer heat. It shrinks away from the tile, cracks along its length and lets go in lumps.

From the pavement, look for a ridge tile out of line with its neighbours, a brown stain on the mortar where water has been running through, or crumbs in the gutter. In the loft, check the ridge board for daylight or a damp patch. The tiles themselves are usually fine. It is the bed that has failed, which is why a repair can often save the roof from early replacement.

What we fix

We lift one or two ridge tiles to see how deep the damage goes. If the tiles are sound, we take them all off, clear the old mortar and fit a dry ridge: a continuous batten with the tiles screwed or clipped down, over a breathable roll that lets the loft ventilate. BS 8612 is the standard for the dry systems themselves, and this method meets the BS 5534 requirement that ridges are fixed mechanically.

Reported UK prices for a dry-fixed ridge on a semi start at £900 and reach £1,600, while scaffolding is a separate line of £300 to £900 in those same guides. Nothing here is a Beacon price list: your fixed quote follows the survey. Do it at the same visit as any verge or hip work, and the scaffold only goes up once. Our guide to BS 5534 tile fixing covers the standard in more depth.

Chapter 5: What is causing damp round the chimney of our old brick house in Worting?

What we find

A chimney stack is the most exposed part of any roof. It stands in the wind with all four sides in the rain, and where it passes through the roof a lead flashing (the strip of metal that seals the joint) has to keep water out. Brick with blue and vitrified headers, as the appraisal describes for the 18th century in Worting, is hard-wearing, but the mortar joints around it are softer and the lead is thin.

Water usually gets in at the flashing first, or at the flaunching, the sloped mortar at the top that holds the pots. Signs include a tide mark on the chimney breast in the room above, plaster that has gone powdery, or white salts on the brick face. Old lead can also crack from years of heating and cooling, and soakers (small lead pieces interleaved with the tiles up the sides) may be missing altogether.

What we fix

We inspect the stack from the roof and then repair what is failing. That may mean replacing the flashing and soakers in new lead, repointing the stack in lime mortar so the soft joints are not trapped behind a harder cement mix, and rebuilding the flaunching. If a few courses of brick have decayed we take out and replace them with matching stock instead of rebuilding the lot.

Typical UK figures reported for chimney leadwork run from £350 to £920 depending on the stack, though the figure you sign is the one fixed after the survey. On a listed house we keep to like-for-like materials and share the photographs with the conservation officer. More detail is on our chimney repairs page.

Questions from Worting homeowners

Can I fit a heavier covering on an older Worting building with timber framing?

Building control approval is needed when a replacement covering weighs at least 15 per cent more than the old one and may mean strengthening the roof structure. That matters on older timber-framed buildings, where the rafters have carried the same load for a long time. At survey we check the timbers, compare the weight of the options and tell you what applies. Your building control body makes the final decision, not us.

Worting was a parish of its own once. Which council deals with a roof job there now?

Worting's civil parish was abolished on 1 April 1932, when it merged with Basingstoke and Wootton St Lawrence, and today Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council handles planning and building control for the whole area. That means one council to ask about a conservation area question or a notifiable re-roof, and we deal with the paperwork where it applies.

Can I swap my slate roof for concrete tiles to save money in the Worting Conservation Area?

You should ask the council first. Slate is part of the character the appraisal describes, and consent may be needed for a different material even where the house is not listed. Repairing the slate you have is usually cheaper than people expect, and natural slate re-roofs are commonly quoted between £120 and £180 a square metre (a typical UK range). If your roof still has useful years in it, we will say so.

Worting House and other listed buildings are nearby. What happens if mine is listed too?

The same rules apply, but more tightly. Ten buildings in the conservation area are listed, and any change to the materials or appearance of a listed house needs consent before work starts. We record the roof in photographs, recommend like-for-like repair and hand over the survey report for your conversation with the conservation officer. Birds and bats are protected, so old roofs may need timing or checks first.

Our Worting roof has a few cracked tiles. Is it worth patching or should we plan a new roof?

A few cracked tiles on an otherwise sound roof is a patch job. We lift tiles around the damage, check the battens and underlay, and replace only what has failed. If the underlay has perished across the slope or the battens are rotten, a re-cover becomes the honest answer, and a typical UK range for re-covering a concrete-tiled three-bed semi is £6,500 to £10,500, set against a quote that is fixed only once we have surveyed.

Nearby areas

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