Sanderstead · CR2
Roof Repairs In Sanderstead
Lost tiles off the hip again after the last Sanderstead gale?
Ridge, hip and eaves repairs for the interwar houses on Croydon's highest ground
Sanderstead sits higher than almost anywhere else in London. Sanderstead Plantation reaches about 175 metres, and the roads around it - Limpsfield Road, Mitchley Hill, Purley Downs Road - get the wind that comes with that. Most houses here are interwar semis and detached homes with hipped roofs and wide overhangs. That shape is the problem. Wind gets under the eaves and pulls at the tiles from below. It also works along the hip lines, where the cut tiles and hip cappings hold on with mortar alone. When a Sanderstead roof loses tiles, the tile itself is rarely at fault. The fixings gave up first.
Free roof survey in Sanderstead
Four details and somebody will come and look at it. There is no charge for the visit, no obligation afterwards, and if the answer is that your roof is fine, that is what you will be told.
The people behind it
A family firm for Sanderstead
Sanderstead sits about as high as the borough goes, and wind at the eaves and hips is the usual story up there. Ring about one of those roofs and you're dealing with a family business run by two brothers, John and Mark.
They manage the team between them and often run jobs together. Customers often say that's refreshing, and the brothers would add that it makes them twice as good as a typical roofing firm. They might be biased.
1,000+
Roofs put right
10 year
Written workmanship guarantee
£0
To have somebody come and look
Repair first
Replacement is the last resort
A medieval village that grew into a hilltop suburb
Sanderstead was a farming parish long before it was a suburb. All Saints Church, begun around 1230 and built of flint, still sits at the old centre. Sanderstead Pond, at the top of the hill, was once a drovers' watering stop on the road to Limpsfield. Most of the houses came much later. Between the wars, and again after 1945, the fields filled with semis and detached houses on generous plots. Some of those roofs have had very little done to them since. A covering can look tidy from the road and still be held on by fixings that are close to ninety years old.
The builders of that period liked a hipped roof with a deep timber fascia and a broad soffit underneath. It looks settled and solid. In a sheltered valley it would be. Up here, the overhang acts like a lip that catches the wind. That pressure lifts the bottom courses, loosens bedding on the hips and works at fascia boards that are now eighty or ninety years old. Down towards Hamsey Green the plots get bigger and the roofs more complicated. Every extra hip and valley is another place for water to get in.
Roof repairs Sanderstead asks for most
Storm Damage Repairs
Sanderstead takes a gale harder than the low ground. Lifted eaves courses, stripped hip tiles and loose ridges are the usual call-outs after a windy night.
Read more about storm damage repairs in SandersteadFascias & Soffits
The deep timber fascias on interwar hipped roofs are now very old. Once they rot, the bottom row of tiles and the gutter have nothing solid to fix to.
Read more about fascias & soffits in SandersteadRoof Replacement
Some original coverings here have lost most of their fixings. When that is true across every slope, a new roof with modern clips is cheaper than chasing tiles every winter.
Read more about roof replacement in SandersteadThose three come up most on Sanderstead roofs. Everything else in the services menu is covered here as well.
What a repair on an exposed Sanderstead roof should include
Height changes the job. The work that keeps a roof dry in Thornton Heath may not survive a winter on Mitchley Hill. This is what we do differently up here.
Mechanical fixing at the hips
Where mortar-bedded hip tiles keep coming loose, we can refit them with a dry hip system that is screwed down. Then a gale has nothing brittle to crack.
Eaves course clipped
The bottom courses take most of the uplift. Replacement tiles there are nailed and clipped, not just hung on their nibs as a lot of the originals were.
Fascia checked behind the gutter
We look at the board itself, not just the paint. Soft timber behind a gutter bracket is the reason gutters on these houses start to sag.
Whole roof looked at
If one hip has lost tiles, the other three hips have had the same wind. We check them all and tell you what we see, even if it can wait.
Honest about replacement
Some interwar coverings can be mended for years. Some are past it. We'll tell you which yours is, and show you the photos that back it up.
"In Sanderstead, a storm call is more often about hip tiles and the eaves course than about a hole in the middle of a slope."
Based on Sanderstead jobs handled by Roof Repairs Croydon
A roof repair in Sanderstead, step by step
Ring, or send a photo
A picture from the pavement or the back garden is often enough to tell whether this is a today job or one that can sensibly wait until next week.
The free visit
We walk round all four sides first, because on a hipped roof the damage often sits on a slope you can't see from the front. Then we check bedding on the hips, eaves fixings and the fascia from a ladder.
What failed, and what let it
Before any figure is mentioned you hear what has gone wrong and the reason it went, with photographs from the roof and from the loft side.
A fixed price on paper
Each item on its own line. Scaffold or a tower, if one is needed at all, sits separately so you can hold it up against anyone else's quote.
The repair itself
Loose hips rebedded or switched to a dry fix system, lifted eaves tiles refixed with clips, soft fascia sections cut out and replaced, and the ridge checked end to end before we pack up.
Signed off
Photographs of the finished work, gutters cleared of anything the job dropped into them, and the 10 year guarantee in writing before anyone leaves Sanderstead.
The 10 year guarantee, and why it is safe to offer
Promising a roof will stay dry is easy. What counts is what happens if it does not. Work booked through Roof Repairs Croydon carries a 10 year workmanship guarantee, on paper, handed to you on the day and written in language you can actually read. The slates, tiles, lead, mortar, membranes and rainwater goods carry their own manufacturer cover on top of that. It varies by product, so you get told which cover applies to your job rather than one headline number that would be wrong on most of them.
Here is the reason a guarantee like that is not a risk. Repairs come back for one reason above all others: the fault was never found in the first place. Somebody went up, saw a stain on the ceiling below, mended whatever looked worst directly above it, and left. Water does not cooperate with that approach. It lands on a slate, runs under it, drops onto a rafter and travels along the rafter before it finds anywhere to fall. On a wide hipped roof in Sanderstead or Shirley that can be five metres from where it came in.
Find the entry point and the repair holds for years. Miss it and no amount of guarantee wording helps anybody. That is why the survey happens before the price, and it is why, if the same water finds its way back into your house inside the guarantee period, putting it right costs you nothing.
10 year
Workmanship guarantee
1,000+
Roofs put right
Covered
Public liability insurance
Per product
Maker's own warranty
What to do in Sanderstead
Nothing to do with roofs. Three places worth an afternoon if you live here or are thinking of moving in.
All Saints Church, Sanderstead
A flint parish church begun around 1230 and extended in the early 1300s. It still marks the old village centre at the top of the hill.
View on Google Maps - All Saints Church, Sanderstead
Kings Wood
Close to 150 acres of ancient oak woodland about half a mile south of the village, bought for public use in 1937. Long straight paths, and a carpet of bluebells in spring.
View on Google Maps - Kings Wood
Sanderstead Pond
An old drovers' pond at the top of Sanderstead Hill, where it meets Addington Road. Excavations nearby turned up finds going back to the Mesolithic.
View on Google Maps - Sanderstead PondWhere Sanderstead sits on our patch
From our base on Penwortham Road, CR2 0QS: about 6 minutes. Planning and building control here sit with London Borough of Croydon.
What Croydon homeowners say
From roads across the borough, once the ladders had gone.
"Damp patch on our landing ceiling for about three years. Two roofers had been out and both mended the tiles directly above it, and neither made the slightest difference. This chap spent twenty minutes in the loft with a torch before he even went outside, then showed me a photo of a split in the lead in the valley about four metres away from the stain. Fixed it in a morning. Three winters on and nothing."
"Water was coming down the front bedroom wall every time it rained hard and I had convinced myself the roof was finished. It was the gutter. Half of it had dropped so the water was sitting in the middle and going over the front rather than down the pipe. He reset the brackets and cleared the gully, charged me a fraction of what I had budgeted for, and told me the roof itself had years left. Could easily have sold me a new one."
"Ours is in the Chatsworth Road conservation area and I had no idea the rules on roof work here are stricter than the rest of Croydon. He knew straight away, explained what I could and could not do without an application, and did the repair in matching slate. That saved me a very awkward conversation with the council later on."
"Lost most of the ridge tiles along the back in a February gale. Rang in the morning, sheeted the same afternoon so the weather could not get in, came back the following week when it was dry and rebedded the whole ridge properly. Sent me photos of everything for the insurance without me even asking. The bill was exactly what the quote said it would be."
"Gutters had been overflowing under the trees for years and the fascia behind them had gone soft. What I appreciated was that he explained why the timber had rotted rather than just quoting to replace it, and pointed out the new soffits needed vents or I would end up with condensation in the loft instead. Nobody had ever mentioned that to me before."
Had us out to your roof?
Two minutes writing a review does more for a small local firm than any amount of advertising, and it helps the next person in Croydon work out who to ring.
Other towns we cover, and what we do there
The same services and the same guarantee apply across every town below, from the Norbury end of the borough down to Caterham.
Roof repair costs in Sanderstead
Two things move the price most on a Sanderstead house. The first is how many hips and valleys the roof has, since each one is separate labour. The second is the state of the timber at the eaves. A hipped interwar roof has fascia on all four sides, so rot found on one elevation often turns up on the others. Wide plots usually make access easy, and a tower can often do instead of a full scaffold. The quote tells you which.
Read the cost guideSanderstead roof repair questions
Do I need planning permission for roof work in Sanderstead?
Sanderstead is the London Borough of Croydon for planning and building control. Like-for-like repairs, such as replacing tiles, rebedding hips or renewing a fascia in the same style, don't normally need an application. The old village around All Saints is one of the areas the council began assessing for conservation area status in its review announced in late 2025. If you're near the church, check the current position with the planning team before changing the look of a roof slope.
Why does my Sanderstead roof keep losing hip tiles?
Most hip tiles on houses of this age sit in sand and cement and nothing else. Mortar shrinks and cracks over time, and on high ground the wind keeps working at it. Rebedding fixes it for a while. If the hips have come loose more than once, a dry hip system screwed into the hip rafter is the more permanent answer.
Is wind damage covered by my home insurance?
Often it is, if the wind was strong enough to count as a storm under your policy and the roof was in reasonable repair. Insurers usually exclude wear and tear, so a hip that failed because its mortar had perished may be refused. We photograph the damage and write down what we found, which helps either way.
Should I replace timber fascias with uPVC?
It is the usual choice now and it removes the painting. The important part is what sits behind it. Capping rotten timber with plastic hides the rot and leaves the gutter fixed to something soft. We replace failed timber first, then fit the new boards, and we check the eaves ventilation while the boards are off.
Get the hips and eaves checked before the next big blow
If you've found tile pieces on the drive, or the gutter has started to dip at one corner, ring us or send a photo. We'll come up, look at all four slopes and tell you what the wind has loosened. The visit and the quote are free.