Drone roof survey in Newton Abbot

Newton Abbot expanded fast in the nineteenth century around the Great Western works, and the housing that came with it is street after street of Victorian terrace. Natural slate, shared party walls, a brick stack every few metres, and a lead valley between the main slope and the rear projection on nearly every house.

Terraced roofs behave as one structure even though they are owned in slices. Water entering at a failed valley on one property can travel along the roof space and appear inside a neighbour's house, and the first sign is usually a stain on the wrong ceiling.

The ornate town centre buildings of the same period bring parapets, decorative ridge work and box gutters that are invisible from the pavement, and the trading estates at the edge of town bring large span industrial roofs with their own problems entirely.

The town sits on the flat floodplain where the Teign becomes tidal, ringed by hills. That geography produces mist and holds it, so roofs here spend long periods damp without any rain having fallen.

Slate that stays damp grows lichen and moss readily, particularly on north-facing slopes and in the shaded lower courses of a terrace. Moss packed into the head lap of a slate is what allows water to track sideways under the covering instead of running off it, and it is one of the most common findings on this stock.

The Bovey basin clay ground to the north-west and the general dampness also mean valley gutters silt up faster than they do on drier sites, so a valley that was cleared five years ago is often due again.

On a terraced street the useful survey is rarely of one house. Seeing the neighbouring roof planes is how you establish whether a problem starts on your roof or arrives on it, and whether the party wall flashing or the shared valley is the actual cause.

A flown survey covers a run of properties in the same flight without needing anybody else's permission to put a ladder on their building, and the imagery makes a conversation with a neighbour a good deal easier than an assertion does.

It also avoids the pavement licence question. Scaffolding a mid terrace in Newton Abbot means blocking a footway on a street where parking is already tight, and it means the neighbours either side living with it for a week.

The racecourse and the industrial estates that grew up around the old Great Western works add another building type to the town's roofing mix: large clear span structures with north light glazing and long valley gutters, similar in principle to Cullompton's or Wellington's mill roofs but generally younger. They fail the same way, through corroded fixings and silted valleys rather than through anything wrong with the tiles, because there are no tiles to speak of.