Drone roof survey in Paignton

Paignton occupies the flat middle of Tor Bay. Unlike Torquay and Brixham, which sit on hills and headlands, there is no landform here to break the weather at all, so when easterly conditions come into the bay the town takes them across its whole width.

Salt spray reaches several streets back from the front in those conditions, and the effect on fixings is the same accelerated corrosion you get anywhere on the coast. Because the ground is flat, it reaches uniformly rather than sparing the sheltered pockets that a hilly town has.

The building stock is largely Edwardian and inter-war seaside terrace and semi, plus a great deal of post-war estate housing to the west, most of it concrete interlocking tile.

Paignton has a large stock of former guest houses and holiday flats, and buildings of that kind have usually grown. Extensions at the back, dormers added into the roof to make another letting room, conservatories, fire escapes and flat roofed additions bolted onto pitched originals over several decades.

Every one of those is a junction between old work and new, and junctions between materials of different ages and different movement characteristics are where water gets in. A dormer cheek that was detailed badly in 1978 will still be letting water in today.

Converted properties also tend to have more people with a partial interest in the roof and nobody with a complete one, which is how a small defect stays unaddressed for years.

On this stock the survey priorities are the added elements rather than the original roof. Dormer cheeks and their flashings, the abutment where a flat extension meets the main slope, the state of any flat covering and whether it is ponding, and the condition of rooflights and their upstands.

After that come the standard coastal items: ridge and verge bedding, corroded fixings, and the gutters and downpipes, which on a long terrace run a considerable distance and block readily.

The imagery is particularly useful on multi-occupancy buildings, because a photograph of the defect is what gets a group of owners to agree on what needs doing and in what order.

Oldway Mansion and the grander buildings around it are the exception to the guest house pattern, roofs on a scale closer to Torquay's villas than to the seaside terraces nearby, and they carry the same complexity of parapets, dormers and multiple roof planes. Down towards Goodrington Sands the housing reverts to type: bungalows and chalets from the mid twentieth century, shallow pitched and close to the beach, taking the same easterly weather as the front but with the added complication of sandy, unstable ground beneath some of the older plots.