Roof repairs and re-roofing in Abbots Langley

Housing in Abbots Langley

What the roofs here are like

Abbots Langley has a genuinely old village centre around St Lawrence's Church and the High Street - brick and rendered cottages under clay tile, some listed, with a tight historic grain. What surrounds it is almost entirely 20th-century and much of it built at speed: extensive interwar development first, then very large postwar estates through the 1950s and 1960s connected to the growth of Watford and Hemel, with standardised semi-detached and terraced housing, shallow-pitched concrete tiled roofs and a high proportion of flat-roofed garages, porches and stores. Bungalow stock is significant, and later private development has continued on the edges of the village towards Bedmond and Leavesden.

What we get called out for

The problems that come up in Abbots Langley

The postwar estate housing is the bulk of our work here and it is all at the same stage of life: concrete tiles laid in the fifties and sixties are now losing their cement face, going rough and patchy and beginning to shed, and the standardised timber eaves have generally been capped over rather than replaced. We do a lot of full fascia, soffit and gutter replacement in Abbots Langley for exactly that reason. Flat roofs on garages and porches are the other constant. The historic village core is a conservation area and needs matched clay tile and, usually, consent - a different job entirely from the estates around it.

Working in Abbots Langley

Access, scaffold and what affects the timescale

Estate access is easy throughout - wide roads, driveways, no licences needed - and this is one of the more straightforward villages for us to work in. The historic core around the church is the exception, with narrow streets, limited parking and conservation-area constraints that mean matched clay tile and usually consent. Traffic around the Leavesden studios can affect delivery timing at either end of the day, which we plan around. Because so much of the housing is standardised postwar stock at the same stage of life, we often end up doing several houses on one street in a season, and there is usually a saving in that.