Chimney Repairs Knutsford

Chimney Work in Knutsford

Knutsford has more protected building in it than almost anywhere else we work. The conservation area takes in King Street and Princess Street more or less end to end, the Georgian and early Victorian frontages behind them, and the Italianate towers and villas that Richard Harding Watt left along Legh Road and Drury Lane. Add the estate cottages and farm buildings out towards Tatton, Mobberley and Plumley, and a great many roofs here are covered by more than the ordinary planning rules.

Chimneys matter more to that than owners often realise. What a designation protects is largely what can be seen from the street, and on an old roof the stacks and the pots standing above them are the most conspicuous thing on the building. A row of tall clay cans, an unusual profile, a stack built with an oversailing brick head — those are the character the listing describes, and they are protected in the same way the front door and the windows are.

Roofline Solutions does the work on the outside of the stack: repointing, cutting off and re-forming heads, leadwork at the roof junction, lifting, matching and rebedding pots, part rebuilds and removals. What we are not is your agent. The application for consent belongs to you or to whoever advises you, and the conservation officer at Cheshire East Council is the person whose view decides it. Flue lining, sweeping and appliance testing are a HETAS or Gas Safe registered installer and a chimney sweep, not a roofer.

What Consent Applies Before a Stack Is Touched

Listing and conservation area designation are two different things and they are constantly confused. A listed building is protected as a whole object, outside and in, and that protection reaches the stack, the pots on it, the mortar in its joints and often outbuildings within the curtilage. A conservation area protects the place rather than one building, mainly by controlling demolition and by limiting what can be done without planning permission. The trap in the second is that the right to take a chimney off an unlisted house is a permitted development right, and an Article 4 direction can remove it street by street.

The line that usually decides whether consent is needed is repair against alteration. Putting back what is there, in the same material and to the same profile and finish, is repair and does not normally require listed building consent. Changing what is there does: a pot of a different pattern, a stack reduced in height, cement render or hard modern pointing over soft old work, a stainless terminal appearing on a skyline that never had one. The practical point is that work which needed consent and did not get it is an offence, and it sticks to the building rather than to whoever did it, so it becomes the current owner’s problem at sale. Ask first, in writing, and keep the answer.

What that means on the roof is that recording comes before repair. Before anything is lifted we want photographs of each face and of the head, from the ground and again from the scaffold; the pots measured for height, diameter, taper and the shape of the bead at the rim, and noted for finish, because a salt-glazed buff can and a red moulded one are not interchangeable; and a sample of the existing mortar kept, since its colour comes from the sand and the sand is what a new mix is matched to. On a building of this age what goes back is usually lime-based, so the work is booked into weather that will let it cure and protected while it does.

Recording an Old Stack Before Anybody Goes Near It

A listed stack is worth photographing once a year from the same spot in the garden, because a set of pictures taken over a few years shows what is changing and gives you something to hand over when the time comes. Take binoculars and write down what is actually up there: how many pots, roughly how tall each one is, whether they are plain cans, octagonal, roll-topped or moulded, and what colour. Then look at the head for open joints and missing material, and at the roof junction for lead or for the grey line of a mortar fillet where lead should be.

The other thing that record shows up is what somebody else has already done. A hard grey band of pointing standing proud of the brick, a collar of cement render round the upper courses, a stack visibly shorter than its neighbours in the same terrace, a modern terminal in a row of clay pots, or black mastic smeared along a flashing all say that an earlier repair was made without much thought for what the building is. That matters twice over: it is usually why the stack is deteriorating, and it is what the conservation officer will want put right when the next works are proposed.

Getting to the Stack in Knutsford

On a protected building the ties are the part of the scaffold that actually touches the fabric, so they are the part to settle first. Drilling into the face of a dressed stone, a moulded brick or a decorated band is not acceptable and is not necessary: ties go into mortar joints where they can be made good afterwards, or through window openings so nothing is drilled at all, or the structure is designed with buttressed towers instead. Railings, stone thresholds, boot scrapers and cast-iron downpipes are listed too, and everything the scaffold passes gets boarded or wrapped.

The street is the other half of it. King Street and the lanes off it are narrow, the buildings stand on the footway and there is no set-back to work in, so a platform there needs a licence from Cheshire East Council, the footway kept open for people to get past, and a start date that does not land on a market or an event day. Out towards Tatton and the farms the problem reverses: plenty of room, but lanes a scaffold wagon may not get down, so the last part is carried in.

Leadwork, Pots and Cowls in Knutsford

Leadwork on an old building is expected to be lead, and for reasons beyond appearance. It is repairable, it is recyclable, it outlasts the pointing around it and it is what the details on the building were designed for. Self-adhesive tapes, painted-on coatings and mastic are none of those things, and on a listed building they are both a poor repair and a change to how it looks. The pieces are formed the traditional way, chased into joints rather than into the face of a stone, wedged with lead and pointed, and kept short and lapped so nothing splits as it moves.

At the top, anything fitted to a pot is visible from the street and is therefore a change to the building. A bird guard or a cowl may well be sensible, and on an occupied flue with jackdaws about it usually is, but the pattern is worth choosing with the skyline in mind and worth mentioning while consent is being discussed: a terracotta or dark cap sitting inside the rim is a very different thing from a bright drum clamped over a moulded can. Where a flue is finished with, the tidiest answer here is to keep the pot where it is and close it with a vented cap inside it, so the roofline is unaltered.