Roof repairs and re-roofing in Prestwood

Housing in Prestwood

What the roofs here are like

Prestwood sits on the ridge above Great Missenden and is largely a product of 20th-century ribbon and estate development. The village has an older thread of cottages and former smallholdings along the main road, brick and flint under steep tile, but the bulk of the housing is interwar and postwar: detached and semi-detached houses and a very high proportion of bungalows, on wide plots with plain tiled roofs. Development continued steadily through the 1960s and 1970s, adding the shallower pitches and broad eaves of that period, and there has been consistent modern infill since. Large gardens mean outbuildings, garden rooms and detached garages are common throughout.

What we get called out for

The problems that come up in Prestwood

Prestwood is high and surrounded by woodland, which makes moss the defining local problem - north-facing slopes here green over faster than almost anywhere else we work, and we do a lot of scraping, soft-washing and biocide treatment. It is also the place where we most often have to tell someone that pressure washing has already taken years off their roof. The bungalow stock brings a specific pattern of work: large roof areas relative to floor space, long shallow slopes, and a lot of them re-covered once already in the 1980s. Flat roofs on garages and garden rooms are the other steady job.

Working in Prestwood

Access, scaffold and what affects the timescale

Prestwood is mostly ribbon development along a busy through road, and that is the main practical consideration: scaffold to a front elevation often needs traffic management and occasionally a licence, and deliveries need timing away from the school run. Behind the road frontage, plots are deep and access is straightforward. Surrounded by woodland on high ground, this is one of the places we most often visit for moss, and we schedule that work for the colder months when growth is dormant and the biocide has time to work before the following spring. Bungalow roofs here are large in area for the floor space, which affects both scaffold and price.