Chapter one
Century-old roofs on brickworkers' houses
Council houses built for the brickworks in the 1920s have reached the age where the fixings matter more than the tiles.
Brickworks operating from the 1890s drove much of Southwater's early twentieth-century growth, and in the 1920s the council built homes for the brickworkers. Those homes are now nearly a century old. Roofs of that age have nearly always been patched, and the patches mark the places water has been getting through. A roof that old does not automatically need replacing, because some need only their ridges seen to, and we say which kind yours is. So the survey comes first: we start at ground level, go up a ladder, then into the loft, and a close-up photograph is taken of each fault.
At a glance
- Brickworks ran from the 1890s
- Council houses for brickworkers date from the 1920s
- Ridge and hip tiles are now mechanically fixed
1.1 Where an old roof gives way
The tiles themselves are rarely the first thing to fail. The ridge is the high line where two slopes meet, and a hipped roof also has a hip running down each corner. Both were traditionally bedded in mortar, which cracks as the building moves. Lower down, the battens (slim timber laths that carry each row of tiles) can soften once damp reaches them, and old iron nails can rust until a tile has almost nothing holding it. A slipped tile or a rusty stain across a bedroom ceiling is usually the symptom of one of these, not the cause, and the stain is seldom right below the gap. In the loft the signs are daylight along the ridge, dark water marks on the rafters, and underlay (the sheet laid beneath the tiles) that has perished or torn.
1.2 Fixing it for a Weald gale
BS 5534 was revised in 2014, and ridge and hip tiles are now held by a mechanical fixing as well as any bedding, because bedding mortar by itself cannot be relied on against suction from the wind. Sound old ridge tiles we lift, clean and secure with a screw or clip instead of replacing them. When tiles have cracked or the bedding has crumbled, a dry-fix ridge on clips, made to BS 8612:2018, is the other route, and our ridge tile repairs page weighs the two. Should the fixings and laths be failing on every course of a slope, patching stops making sense, and the photographs of the timber show you why. A fault confined to a single valley gets a repair to that valley alone, while every other part of the roof is left as it was.
A survey of a brickworker's house
- From the road We read the ridge and hips from the road for lifted tiles, then scan each slope for gaps.
- On the ladder We check the verge and eaves, where the wind first gets under the covering.
- In the loft Daylight at the ridge, damp rafters or torn underlay show where water has been entering.
- The photographs Each fault is shot close up on your roof, so the decision rests on evidence.
- The written quote The quote arrives after the survey and covers only the work the cause calls for.
