Roof repairs, shared valley and party wall work and flat roof waterproofing across SW18, from the Tonsleys and Wandsworth Town to the Arts and Crafts houses around the Common. Free survey, 10-year workmanship guarantee.
In the terraced grid that makes up most of SW18, the roof is not a single building element belonging to one house. Valleys run between properties, party walls and chimney stacks are shared down the middle, and the rainwater from several houses frequently leaves through one linked system. A failure two doors away can put water into your bedroom, and a repair confined to your own title can achieve nothing at all.
K & M Roofing Solutions covers the whole of SW18, including Wandsworth Town, the Tonsleys, the streets around Wandsworth Common, Lyford and Routh Road, Trinity Road, the riverside development and the Fitzhugh Estate.
That shared geometry is the thing we survey for first here. On a detached house you look at one roof. On a Wandsworth terrace you look at where the water goes after it leaves yours, and often at the neighbour's slope as well, because otherwise the diagnosis is a guess.
Where a leak turns into a conversation between neighbours, it helps that both sides can look us up: we are listed on Google with the registered address and the review history. The rating there is 5.0 from 60 reviews.
Wandsworth has more variety than a single postcode usually holds, and the roof types run from Victorian slate to mid-century flat.
The Tonsleys, the tight grid of Victorian streets near Wandsworth Town, are the densest of it: two and three storey terraces built close together with shared valleys, party walls and stacks. Around Wandsworth Common the same period continues in a looser grid of Victorian and Edwardian terraces and semi-detached houses.
Lyford Road, Routh Road and Trinity Road are a different proposition again. The houses are larger, detached and semi-detached, and among them sit later Arts and Crafts properties with roughcast render, red brick, deep clay tiled slopes and the complicated roof geometry that style is known for. Sweeping catslides, tile hanging and multiple valleys look wonderful and give water a great many places to get in.
Wandsworth Town adds a layer of riverside development on the Thames side, and the Fitzhugh Estate contributes mid-century point blocks whose flat roofs are managed rather than owned by any one resident. Those three groups need three different conversations, and the price per square metre is the least interesting difference between them.
Most Wandsworth callouts trace back to something the building shares with its neighbours.
Where two SW18 roofs meet, the valley between them carries water from both. If the lead has split, the valley has silted up or a neighbour has had work done badly, the water that comes through appears in your house rather than theirs. This is the most common single cause of a Wandsworth leak that survives two or three attempted repairs, because each attempt only looked at one side of it.
In the Tonsleys and similar terraced grids the rainwater from several properties is frequently collected and discharged together. A blockage at one point backs up along the run and finds a weakness somewhere else entirely. Clearing your own outlet does nothing if the constriction is three houses down, which is why we ask what the neighbours have noticed before we quote.
A stack straddling the party wall between two Wandsworth houses is a single structure with two owners. Failed flaunching, open pointing or a cracked flashing on one side lets water into both, and the stack cannot be repaired properly from one side alone. These jobs go better when both households are told what is being proposed before the scaffold arrives rather than after.
The Arts and Crafts houses around Lyford, Routh and Trinity Road have far more roof detail than a standard terrace: multiple valleys, catslides sweeping down over side additions, tile hanging on upper walls and deep overhangs. Each junction is a potential entry point, and clay tile of that age is brittle enough that walking a slope carelessly creates the next repair. These roofs need surveying from access equipment or from the air rather than by scrambling about on them.
Roughcast is common on the Wandsworth Arts and Crafts stock and it hides its own defects well. Where it meets a roof, an abutment or a chimney, a crack behind the render lets water in with nothing visible from the ground. When we find damp inside one of these houses with an apparently sound roof, the render junction is the first place we look.
The mid-century blocks on the Fitzhugh Estate and similar developments have large flat roofs under management rather than individual ownership. They are refurbishment candidates rather than repair candidates, and the deciding factor is usually whether the work can be phased so residents stay in place. A cold-applied overlay does that without a hot works permit or a strip-out.
Wandsworth has more than forty conservation areas across the borough, which is a high number by London standards and means the odds of your SW18 address sitting in one are better than most people expect. Wandsworth Town, Magdalen Park and Old Devonshire Road are all designated.
The borough has also made Article 4 directions on many streets, with a concentration around Clapham Junction. The effect is the same wherever they apply: the rights that normally let an owner alter a roof without asking are withdrawn, so an ordinary-looking SW18 street can still require a full application for a dormer or a change of covering.
The Tonsleys are worth singling out because the grid is tight and the roofscape is uniform, which is exactly the character a designation exists to protect. On a run of identical Victorian terraces, one house changing its covering or adding a front-facing dormer is visible from the street immediately, and that is the kind of change that gets refused.
None of this restricts a like-for-like repair. It restricts changing what the roof looks like. We flag which side of that line a job falls on at survey, and where the answer is genuinely unclear we say so rather than guessing on your behalf.
These four cover the shared-structure work that SW18 generates more of than anywhere else we cover.
Valley leadwork, shared party wall stacks, ridge and hip re-bedding, and clay tile repairs on the Arts and Crafts slopes around Wandsworth Common.
More about pitched roof repair and re-roofingRear additions, dormers and the large managed roofs on the SW18 estates, including correcting falls where water has nowhere to go.
More about flat roof repair and waterproofingCold-applied and seamless, which suits the estate blocks here because the work happens above residents with no hot works permit and nothing torn off.
More about liquid applied waterproofingThe practical way to inspect a shared valley, a party wall stack or a brittle Arts and Crafts clay slope without scaffolding and without anyone walking on it.
More about drone roof surveySend us your SW18 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.
