Roof repairs and re-roofing in Amersham

Housing in Amersham

What the roofs here are like

Amersham is really two towns with two completely different roofscapes. Old Amersham, down in the Misbourne valley in HP7, is a historic market town with a High Street of listed and period buildings - steep clay peg tile, handmade tile with real camber and colour variation, timber framing, and long unbroken runs of roof over what were originally separate burgage plots. Amersham on the Hill, in HP6, grew after the Metropolitan Railway arrived and is classic Metroland: 1920s and 1930s semi-detached and detached houses, gabled and hipped, tile-hung upper storeys, generous bay windows with their own small roofs. Later postwar and 1960s development fills in around both, and there is modern infill throughout.

What we get called out for

The problems that come up in Amersham

Old Amersham is a conservation area with a great many listed buildings, and roofing there is a different discipline: consent is usually needed, materials have to match, and handmade peg tile has to be sourced and sorted rather than ordered off a pallet. We will tell you at the quote stage what we think the planners will want. Up on the hill the work is more familiar - bay roofs in lead that have reached the end, mortar ridges that need converting to dry ridge, and tile-hung elevations where the battens have gone. The Metroland houses have a lot of small bay and porch roofs, and those are where the leaks nearly always start.

Working in Amersham

Access, scaffold and what affects the timescale

The two halves of Amersham are entirely different jobs to organise. In Old Amersham the High Street is busy, the buildings are listed, and a scaffold generally needs both a licence and consent - assume several weeks between agreeing the work and starting it, and expect deliveries to be restricted to certain times. Up on the hill it is ordinary suburban working: driveway parking, scaffold on your own land, no licence needed. When we quote in Amersham we will tell you which of those two situations you are in, because it makes a real difference to the lead time even when the roof work itself is identical.