Roof repairs and re-roofing in Bovingdon

Housing in Bovingdon

What the roofs here are like

Bovingdon is a large village on the plateau between Chesham and Hemel Hempstead, built around a green and a long high street. The older core has period cottages and a Victorian and Edwardian element in brick with clay tile, generally steep-pitched with prominent chimneys. What distinguishes Bovingdon from the smaller villages nearby is the scale of its postwar growth: substantial estates were built from the 1950s through the 1970s, giving long runs of semi-detached and terraced housing with shallow-pitched concrete tiled roofs, standardised details and a great many flat-roofed garages and porches. Later private development has filled in around the edges, and there is a good deal of bungalow stock on the side roads.

What we get called out for

The problems that come up in Bovingdon

The postwar estate housing is now exactly at the age where concrete tiles start failing wholesale - the cement face washes off, the tiles roughen and go patchy, and they begin to shed. If your roof has gone from a solid colour to mottled grey and feels rough, that is what is happening. The other volume job here is flat roofs: the garages and porches on those estates were felted originally and a great many are still on coverings that are decades past their life. Bovingdon sits high and open, with the former airfield to the west, so wind is a factor on ridges and verges.

Working in Bovingdon

Access, scaffold and what affects the timescale

Easy access throughout - estate roads are wide, most houses have a drive, and scaffold lorries have no trouble. Parking is rarely an issue except immediately around the high street. Bovingdon is high and open, with the old airfield to the west and very little shelter, so we watch the forecast closely for anything involving felt, GRP or an exposed ridge. On the postwar estates the roofs are near-identical, which works in your favour: we have priced and done so many of them that our quotes here are quick and accurate, and we can usually tell you roughly what you are looking at from a photograph before we come out.