Lewisham roofing, between Old Canterbury Road and the rail line

A small suburb with a dense roofscape

Lewisham is compact and tightly built. Between Old Canterbury Road, the main rail line at Lewisham station and the Lewisham West light rail stop, almost everything is attached or semi-attached — Victorian terraces, Federation semis, and single-fronted cottages in continuous rows with brick parapets and no eaves.

Because the suburb is small and the blocks are narrow, roofs here are physically close together. Your roof, your neighbours roof and the one past that often form one unbroken surface, drained by a handful of box gutters and downpipes.

What usually goes wrong

The single most common Lewisham call is a ceiling stain traced back to a box gutter sump that has choked with leaf litter and roof grit. A box gutter on a Class 1 home is designed for a very short, very intense burst of rain with only 30 mm of freeboard to spare, so a part-blocked outlet is enough to put the water over the back lip and into the ceiling.

After that:

• Party-wall flashings patched by different trades, now leaking at the join
• Parapet cappings cracked, with water tracking down inside the brickwork
• Slipped slate on the older rows, where the original iron nails have corroded
• Rear skillion and lean-to roofs at a pitch too low for the tile that is on them

Gutter and box gutter work and targeted leak repairs are the bulk of it.

Shared roofs, shared decisions

On a terrace row, a flashing failure is rarely confined to one house. We tell you honestly when the sensible fix involves the neighbour, and when yours can be done in isolation. Getting agreement early is much cheaper than discovering the problem with a scaffold already up.

Also in this pocket

Petersham, Summer Hill, Dulwich Hill and Stanmore. The complete list has the rest.

Book in

Call (02) 8000 1103 or use the quote form. Free inspection and a written quote, with no obligation.