Roof inspection in Honiton

Honiton's High Street is unusually long for a town of its size, and the buildings along it span several centuries: Georgian and Victorian frontages over older cores in places, giving way to more ordinary Victorian and 20th century housing on the streets running off it. Natural slate and clay tile dominate the older buildings, with concrete tile on the later estate housing.

Honiton's long history as a lace-making and market town has left it with a particularly dense concentration of listed and locally significant buildings along the High Street itself, more so than a lot of comparably sized Devon towns.

A lot of Honiton's High Street buildings carry commercial premises at ground level with flats or storage above, and the roof over a shop is frequently the last thing anyone has actually looked at, since ground level attention naturally goes to the frontage rather than upwards. Flashings where a rear extension meets the original building, and valleys on the more complex older roofs, are the priority checks here.

On the residential streets off the High Street, the usual Devon pattern applies: ageing ridge bedding on Victorian stock, and gutters and outlets on the later 20th century housing.

Where a High Street building has a rear yard or a lower rear roof section, that area is worth its own check, since it is often built to a different standard and age than the main frontage roof visible from the street.

Honiton sits on a busy route, and closing a stretch of the High Street for scaffold access is a bigger disruption here than in a quieter side street town. An inspection reaches the roofs above the shopfronts without any of that disruption, which is often the deciding factor for a High Street owner weighing up how to get a roof looked at at all.

The town's regular market days bring extra footfall and vehicle activity to the High Street, worth working around when planning a visit to a town centre property.

For a commercial premises with residential space above, it is worth clarifying who the report should be addressed to, the freeholder, the shop tenant or a managing agent, before the visit takes place.

Honiton's position on a well-used route through East Devon means it is often a convenient stop when covering several nearby addresses in one day, worth mentioning if a landlord or agent has other properties within the wider Honiton and Axminster area.

For a listed High Street building, the report is written with the specific level of photographic detail a heritage officer would find useful, kept on file even where no repair work is currently planned.

For a commercial building with flats above, the report most often settles a straightforward practical question, whether the roof over the shop is the source of a damp patch reported by the flat's occupant, which is exactly the kind of finding a ground level look cannot resolve.

For a residential buyer on one of Honiton's side streets, an inspection ahead of exchange gives the same considered pre-purchase reassurance it provides anywhere else in this coverage area, specific to what is actually on that particular roof.