Roof repairs and re-roofing in Chesham

Housing in Chesham

What the roofs here are like

Chesham sits in a valley where four dry valleys meet the River Chess, and the housing follows that shape: a tight Victorian core on the valley floor and later estates climbing the sides. The town centre and the streets running off it are largely 19th-century terraces built for the brush, boot and brewing trades, most of them originally slate-roofed with shared party walls and shallow front slopes running straight down to the pavement. Around that sits a substantial band of 1930s semi-detached housing on the hill roads, almost all clay or early concrete tile, and beyond that postwar and 1960s-70s estates on the higher ground with shallower pitches and a good number of flat-roofed garages and extensions. Older cottages nearer the church and the Bury are steeper-pitched and often peg-tiled.

What we get called out for

The problems that come up in Chesham

This is home, so we know the roofs here better than anywhere. The recurring jobs are nail sickness on the Victorian terraces - sound slate coming off because the fixings have rusted through - and cracked mortar ridges on the 1930s stock, which is now well past the twenty to thirty years mortar bedding gives you. On the valley-floor terraces access is often tight and shared with a neighbour, which affects the scaffold rather than the roof. Chesham has a conservation area covering the older parts of the town centre, so if you are re-roofing a period property near the Broadway or Church Street, expect to need to match the existing material and check whether consent applies before you order anything.

Working in Chesham

Access, scaffold and what affects the timescale

Working in Chesham is mostly about access rather than the roof. On the valley-floor terraces there is no off-street parking and the scaffold usually has to stand on the pavement, which means a licence from Buckinghamshire Council and a few days' notice - we handle that, but it affects the start date rather than the price. Rear access is often shared with a neighbour or reached through an alley, and on a terrace we will nearly always need to speak to the house next door before we start. The advantage of being based here is response time: for a leak in Chesham we can usually get someone out the same day.