Flat roof refurbishment and repair for offices, blocks and warehouse conversions across SE1, carried out on buildings that stay open and trading. Insurance and RAMS issued before we mobilise.
Most of the roofs we are called to in SE1 belong to a building rather than to a person. A warehouse conversion off Bermondsey Street, a block in Borough, an office on Southwark Bridge Road: in each case the covering, the parapet and the roof plant sit outside every individual demise, the freeholder or the management company holds them, and the lease decides who pays. Working that out first is not administrative throat-clearing, it is the step that determines who can even instruct the work.
K & M Roofing Solutions works across SE1 for managing agents, block managers, commercial landlords and residents associations, as well as for leaseholders in the converted warehouses and tanneries. The survey report is written so it can go straight to whoever holds the repairing obligation, with photographs and a plain statement of what failed and where.
The second thing that shapes an SE1 job is that almost nothing here can close. Offices are occupied, ground floors are trading, and the flats above them are lived in. That rules out a strip and re-cover on most of these buildings and rules in cold-applied refurbishment, which is done from above with no torch, no fire watch and nothing cleared from the floor below.
Before an agent instructs a contractor they have not used, the usual first check is the listing: K & M Roofing Solutions on Google shows the registered company address, the phone number and every review left for us. The rating there is 5.0, from 60+ reviews.
SE1 puts four eras of building within a few hundred metres of each other, and the roof on each behaves differently.
The converted warehouses and tanneries around Bermondsey Street and Shad Thames are the signature stock. They carry large flat roof areas, roof terraces, lift overruns and rooflights, which means the roof is mostly detail rather than open field. Every terrace threshold, every shaft head and every rooflight upstand is a junction, and junctions are where these buildings leak.
Behind them sit Georgian houses and Victorian terraces on the medieval street pattern, where the plots are narrow and irregular and the roofs are shallow and hidden behind parapets. That last point matters more in SE1 than anywhere else we work, and it has a practical consequence set out below.
Then there is the new build. Borough, Southwark and Bermondsey have gained a substantial amount of tall residential development through the regeneration programme, all of it professionally managed with planned maintenance rather than reactive repair.
Finally the commercial and light industrial stock: office buildings, yards and workshops, including Black Swan Yard and the buildings along Southwark Bridge Road. These are the roofs where a leak is a business interruption rather than a domestic inconvenience.
The pattern in SE1 is that faults are found late, because on most of these buildings nobody can see the roof.
The Georgian and Victorian roofs in SE1 are shallow and sit behind a parapet wall, so the owner cannot see the roof from the street or from any window. There is no moment where somebody notices a slipped slate. The first sign of failure is a stain on a ceiling in the flat below, by which time water has been sitting in the build-up for weeks. On these buildings a scheduled inspection is not a luxury, it is the only way the roof gets looked at at all.
A converted warehouse roof is punctuated by things that go through it. Rooflights, lift motor rooms, ventilation shafts and stair cores each need an upstand, a termination and a seal, and each was formed by whoever did the conversion to whatever standard applied at the time. When one of these buildings leaks, the field of the roof is usually intact and the fault is at one of those penetrations.
The terraces added to SE1 conversions sit directly over flats and offices, with a walking surface laid over the waterproofing. That makes the failure invisible and the access awkward: the decking or paving has to come up before anyone can see what is underneath. It also means the waterproofing has to tolerate foot traffic, planters and furniture, which is a different specification from an unused roof.
Commercial roofs in Southwark carry plant that was installed by people who were not roofers. Condenser feet bolted through the covering, cable trays dragged across it and ductwork resting on unprotected membrane are all routine finds, and all of them are entry points. We survey what is standing on the roof as carefully as the roof itself.
Where a building has been converted or extended, the rainwater outlets often still serve the layout the building had before. A roof that now includes a terrace, a new lift core and a plant deck can be draining through the same two outlets it had as a warehouse. Under heavy rain the water backs up rather than leaving, and it finds the weakest upstand.
The most expensive delay we see in SE1 is not technical. A leak into a converted flat sits unrepaired for months while the leaseholder, the freeholder and the managing agent establish whose obligation it is under the lease. A survey that states factually what failed, where, and what it will take to put right generally settles that faster than further correspondence does.
On an SE1 commercial roof the survey question is rarely what is wrong, it is how anyone gets up there to look. Roofs here carry plant, ductwork, cable runs, lift overruns and shaft heads, they sit on buildings tall enough that access is a booked operation rather than a ladder, and the permit to work at height frequently takes longer to arrange than the inspection itself would take.
A drone removes that entirely for the first pass. We fly the roof, photograph every elevation, every upstand and every piece of plant, and produce a condition record without a permit, a cherry picker or a single person on the roof. For a managing agent that is often the difference between having a survey this month and having one when the access contractor next has a slot.
It is particularly useful on the parapet leaks that Southwark buildings specialise in, where water gets behind the upstand and travels before it appears, and on the roof terraces built over habitable space. On a terrace the covering sits under a deck, so nothing about the waterproofing is visible from on top of it, but the upstands, the thresholds and the drainage around the edge are, and those are where terraces over occupied rooms usually fail.
Access is why most SE1 roofs get flown rather than walked. The drone roof survey and inspection page describes what a flight covers and what the report contains.
Two designations affect most heritage work in this part of SE1: the Bermondsey Street conservation area and the Tower Bridge conservation area, both of which restrict permitted development and control what may be changed on a visible elevation or roofscape.
Southwark has also made Article 4 directions of a different kind from the ones in the residential boroughs we cover. Rather than protecting the appearance of houses, these withdraw the permitted development right to convert offices to residential use in parts of Bermondsey and Elephant and Castle, protecting employment floorspace.
That is worth knowing if a roof project is attached to a change of use. A scheme that assumes an office can become flats without an application may be starting from the wrong premise in these areas, and the roof specification usually follows the use rather than the other way round.
For straightforward work the position is the familiar one. Renewing a failed covering, repairing leadwork or waterproofing a parapet is repair. Altering the roofscape, adding plant that is visible from the street or forming a new terrace is alteration, and inside a designated area that needs an application. We establish which one a scheme is before it is priced.
Almost every SE1 instruction comes with the same constraint, so these four are built around it.
The core of our SE1 work. Cold-applied refurbishment above occupied offices, retail and flats, phased so no area is left open at the end of a shift and no hot works permit is needed.
More about commercial flat roofingScheduled inspections for buildings whose roofs nobody can see, with dated photographs and a written note after each visit for the building file and the service charge account.
More about planned maintenance for agents and blocksTerraces over habitable space, rooflight and shaft upstands, and outlets that are draining a bigger roof than they were designed for.
More about flat roof repair and waterproofingA seamless system is the practical answer on a warehouse conversion, because it forms around a lift overrun or a rooflight upstand as one continuous layer instead of being cut and lapped at every penetration.
More about liquid applied waterproofingSend us your SE1 address and what you have noticed. The survey is free, and if the honest answer is that you do not need the work, that is what the report will say.
