Vertical tile hanging: repairs and replacement

1How a tile-hung wall keeps the rain out

Tile hanging is a wall covering, but it works on the same principle as a roof. Small clay tiles are hung from timber battens fixed to the wall, each course overlapping the one beneath. A small lug on the upper edge of every tile, the nib, hooks over its batten and stops it sliding. Rain runs down the face and drips clear, which is why the finish suits exposed gables, upper storeys and bay fronts in Sussex villages.

The tiles are only half of the system. At external corners, special angle tiles or soakers (small folded pieces of lead woven between the courses) turn the water round the edge. Under a window sill, and where the hanging meets a roof slope, a flashing does the same job: lead dressed to close the gap between two surfaces. A leak that shows inside a tile-hung wall often begins at one of those details, not in the field of plain tiles. BS 5534 covers vertical cladding as well as pitched roofs, so the wall is treated as kin to the roof above it.

2Slipped tiles, rotten battens and open corners

Tiles on a hung wall fail in recognisable ways. One drops a course or two when its nib has snapped or its fixing has given up, leaving a dark gap in the pattern. Cracks run across a tile face where frozen water has expanded. Lower down, moss and a bulge in the courses suggest the battens behind are holding moisture.

Inside the house the signs are a brown stain on the room wall below the hung area, a stain under the window reveal, or flaking paint near the chimney breast of a gable. Water seldom comes out where it went in, so the stain can sit well below the failed tile.

You can learn plenty from the pavement with binoculars. Look for courses that no longer run straight, tiles a different colour from their neighbours, and sill or corner details that have opened. Leave the close inspection to a surveyor, because a wall tile is brittle and a ladder resting on it will crack more than it finds. We trace the fault before quoting.

3Patch, partial re-hang or strip the lot

The right job depends on what is behind the tiles. If the battens are sound and only a handful of tiles are cracked or slipped, we lift the courses above, slide new tiles into place and re-secure the neighbours. That is a repair in the fullest sense, and it is what we recommend when it properly solves the leak.

If the battens are soft, the fixings are failing across a whole area or water is getting behind at a sill, patching only hides the fault. The area is then stripped back to sound timber, the battens are renewed, the junction is re-formed in new lead and the tiles are re-hung. Good old tiles are kept and reused, with any shortfall made up from matching stock.

Height, area, scaffold access and the number of tiles to source set the cost, and the survey photographs arrive with a quote in writing that states one total price. If the gable is being re-covered at roof level too, see hip against gable costs, and if its shape is changing, changing the pitch of a roof. The wider picture is on our pitched roofing page.

4Finding tiles that match an old wall

New tiles rarely look like forty-year-old ones. Weathering changes the colour and the surface, and old hand-made tiles have a slight camber and variation in size which a modern pressed tile lacks. A block of bright new tiles set in one patch makes a repair that is dry but plain to see.

There are several ways round it. Tiles taken from a less visible face, such as the back of a bay, can be reused on the front, with the new ones going where they will be least noticed. Reclaimed tiles of the right size are another route. A mixed batch spread evenly across the whole wall softens the change better than a single patch. Our guide to roof tile types shows how profile, size and nib differ, and those details need to agree before colour does.

On a listed building, Adur & Worthing Councils treat work in non-matching materials as needing listed building consent, so speak to the council's conservation officer first.

5Why this wants the right access

A hung wall is often at first-floor level or higher, beside a window, over a porch or at a gable apex. Reaching it safely takes a scaffold or a tower, and the tiles are far too fragile to lean on. Standing on a lower roof to reach a bay is how tiles on both surfaces get broken, and the same warning applies to every tiled slope.

Once the covering is open we photograph what is underneath, because a wet batten or a split soaker is easier to agree on when you can see it. Those pictures go with the quote, and the finished work is checked against them. Rubbish goes with us when we leave, and the wall is left tidy and the garden is not full of broken clay.