Roof repairs and re-roofing in Chorleywood

Housing in Chorleywood

What the roofs here are like

Chorleywood grew around its common after the Metropolitan Railway arrived, and it is one of the best places in the area to see turn-of-the-century and Arts and Crafts influenced housing - deep roofs, sweeping catslides, tile-hung elevations, tall chimneys and roofs that are a deliberate part of the architecture rather than a lid on top. Voysey's The Orchard is the famous example. Around that core sits a large stock of 1920s and 1930s detached and semi-detached housing, then postwar and 1960s development on the roads away from the common, and a good deal of modern replacement housing on subdivided plots. Properties backing onto the common are typically large, wooded and heavily extended.

What we get called out for

The problems that come up in Chorleywood

The Arts and Crafts and early 20th-century houses have generous, complicated roofs - catslides, swept valleys, deep overhangs - and they need someone who will work with the original geometry rather than simplify it. They also carry a lot of original leadwork now at or past a century. On the interwar and postwar stock the common jobs are mortar ridges past their life and tired fascias and soffits, most of them the original timber. The common itself means heavy tree cover on a great many properties, so moss and gutter work is constant. Parts of Chorleywood are in a conservation area.

Working in Chorleywood

Access, scaffold and what affects the timescale

Access is generally good - large plots, private drives, room for scaffold. Two things complicate it. The first is tree cover: many properties back onto the common or have mature protected trees, and getting a scaffold up through a canopy sometimes needs the council's agreement first. The second is the architecture. The Arts and Crafts and early 20th-century houses have deep overhangs, sweeping catslides and complicated geometry, which means more scaffold and more time than a comparable-sized modern roof - worth understanding when you compare quotes, because a cheap price on one of these houses usually means somebody has not looked properly at what is involved.