Drone roof survey in Torquay

Torquay's Victorian and Edwardian resort architecture produces roofscapes of a complexity you do not meet anywhere else in the county. Italianate villas and hotels with towers, turrets, mansards, deep eaves, multiple gables, parapets, decorative ridge cresting and lead lined gutters running behind cornices at high level.

Every one of those features is a junction, and junctions are where roofs leak. A building of this type can have thirty separate details each capable of letting water in, and from the ground you can see perhaps a third of them.

Many of these buildings have been converted into flats or run as hotels, which means the roof is somebody else's problem right up until the point where water arrives in a top floor room.

The town is built across a series of limestone hills, so almost every plot has a gradient and a great many properties sit on terraced ground with retaining walls. Scaffolding a four storey Victorian villa on a sloping plot with restricted access is a serious cost, and for a building that tall it is a serious cost before anybody has confirmed there is a fault.

That is why so many of these roofs go unlooked at. The cost of finding out has always been out of proportion to the cost of the likely repair, so owners wait until something forces the issue.

A flown survey reaches the top of a turret at the same cost as the ground floor eaves, which changes that calculation entirely.

Tor Bay faces east, which is why the town grew as a resort: it is sheltered from the prevailing south-westerly. That shelter is real and it is one reason the Victorian stock has lasted as well as it has.

What it does not give is protection from easterly weather, which comes straight into the bay, and salt reaches the whole of the seafront and the lower streets behind it in those conditions. Rendered elevations and rendered stacks, of which there are a great many here, crack and then let water into the masonry behind.

The result is that the two sides of a Torquay building often age at quite different rates, and a survey needs to cover both rather than assuming the front elevation tells the story.

Babbacombe and Oddicombe, on the steep cliffs north of the harbour, take the exposure question to its extreme: houses perched above the beaches on ground so steep that some plots are reached by winding paths rather than roads, and a scaffold contractor's first job is often working out whether a truck can get anywhere near the building at all. It is the clearest possible case for flying rather than climbing, because the alternative may not be practically possible on some of these plots regardless of price.