Roofers in Plympton

Plympton St Maurice was laid out as a small planned town below its Norman castle, and in 1328 it became one of the four stannary towns that controlled the tin coming off Dartmoor. Fore Street is mostly eighteenth and early nineteenth century, two and three storeys, much of it limestone behind rendered Georgian fronts, with sixty-eight listed buildings in the conservation area and long narrow burgage plots running back from the street. Roofs here are old, varied and often hard to reach from the back. The rest of Plympton is the housing that grew up between its old villages, St Mary's, Colebrook, Woodford, Newnham and Chaddlewood among them, after the town became part of the city in 1967. Those are mostly semis, detached houses and short terraces, and at their age the usual faults are moss, porous tiles, ridges with the mortar gone and felt that has perished at the eaves.

The old town is sheltered: the land rises steeply to the south up to the ridge the A38 runs along, and more gently to the north towards the Ridgeway. What Plympton gets instead of salt is the rain coming off the moor, and trees. Gutters under them fill quickly in the autumn, and a flat roof on a garage that holds a pond in December will be a soft deck by spring.

Plympton St Maurice has been a conservation area since 1968, so a change of roof material or new roof windows on the street side needs the council's say first; a like-for-like repair normally does not. Its houses front narrow streets and candy-tiled pavements, with alleys between the plots, so we plan scaffold and materials on the free roof check. On the newer roads, drives and level access make scaffold quick to put up.

Plympton St Maurice, Plympton St Mary, Ridgeway, Colebrook, Woodford, Chaddlewood, Underwood, Newnham and Glenholt, with Hemerdon, Sparkwell, Langage, Lee Moor, Shaugh Prior and Wotter covered from here. Plymstock is written up separately, and so is Ivybridge further east.