New Roofs in Royal Wootton Bassett

A repair fixes an event. A re-roof answers a pattern. The honest dividing line is whether the same roof keeps producing new problems in new places — three slipped tiles in three different areas over two winters is not bad luck, it is nail fatigue announcing itself, and patching it individually costs more over five years than replacing it once.

The second test is the underlay. On roofs of this age the felt beneath the tiles has usually gone the colour and texture of a digestive biscuit. Once it tears, every gust drives rain straight onto the ceiling below regardless of how good the tiles above it look from the road. You cannot replace underlay without stripping the covering, which is what turns a repair conversation into a re-roof one.

Scaffold first, always — for a two-storey property in Royal Wootton Bassett that means an edge-protected working platform, not a ladder and optimism. The old covering comes off to the rafters and goes into a skip, and only at that point can anyone see the deck honestly. Soft or rotten battens are replaced rather than reused; on the older High Street properties this is routine rather than exceptional.

Then a breathable membrane, counter-battened where the pitch or the exposure calls for it, new graded battens set to the correct gauge for the tile, and the covering itself. Ridge and verge are mechanically fixed — dry-fixed systems using clips and screws rather than the sand-and-cement mortar bedding that used to be standard. That is not a preference; since the 2014 revision of BS 5534, mortar alone is no longer an acceptable fixing for ridge, hip and verge on a new roof.

Finally the roofline: gutters, fascias and soffits are almost always renewed at the same time, because the scaffold is already up and doing it separately later costs more than doing it now.

Includes scaffold, strip and disposal, new breathable membrane, graded battens, dry ridge and verge, and covering. Chimney work, structural timber repairs and roofline replacement are itemised separately rather than buried in a single figure.

The older core of the town — the High Street, the ground around the seventeenth-century Town Hall on its stone pillars, and the lanes running off it — sits within a conservation area, and roofs there are not a free choice. Handmade clay plain tiles, natural slate and stone are the local vocabulary, and replacing any of them with a modern concrete interlocker is the kind of decision that attracts correspondence from the planning department.

The practical answer is usually reclaimed or hand-made-to-match rather than nearest-modern-equivalent, and it costs more. It is worth knowing that before you compare two quotes that look wildly different, because one of them may have quoted the right tile and the other the cheap one.