St Mary Magdalene's Church
Grade II* listed parish church dating from 1343, set in its churchyard in the older part of Longfield. A timber-clad belfry sits on top of the tower.
Learn more about St Mary Magdalene's Church on Google MapsRoof repairs in Longfield tend to follow the weather. A blustery night comes in across the open fields, and by morning there's a ridge tile in the flower bed or a row of verge tiles hanging off the gable. Leaks come later, once the gap has let rain in for a few weeks. Frost plays its part as well. Away from the river, inland nights can be colder, and cracked or porous tiles get a little worse each winter. We repair roofs on Main Road, Station Road, Hoselands Hill and right across New Barn. The job is always the same at heart: find the fault, fix it properly, show you the proof. The survey and written quote cost you nothing.
A roofer rings you back to arrange a visit.
No guesswork and no padding. Here's how we approach a repair on a Longfield or New Barn roof.
01
Once tiles have gone, every shower makes it worse. We aim to get a temporary cover on fast, then come back and repair properly when the right tiles are in, rather than forcing in whatever's to hand. A rushed repair after a storm is often the one you end up paying for twice.
02
A tile that has started to flake or crack will fail in the next hard winter. We look for them during every repair and point them out, so you can replace a handful now instead of a whole section later. They're easy to miss from the ground and obvious from a ladder.
03
Mortar verges on exposed gables crack and shed. Where it suits the house, we fit a mechanically fixed dry verge, which copes with wind far better and doesn't need repointing every few years.
04
A split in an extension roof can sometimes be repaired rather than replaced. We'll tell you if the rest of the covering is sound enough for that to be worth it, or whether you'd be throwing good money after bad.
05
Chimney flashings, abutments against walls and the lead around rooflights all move with the seasons. We redress or replace lead that has lifted, split, or been smeared over with mastic as a quick fix.
06
We photograph the problem and the finished repair. If you can't get up there, you shouldn't have to take anyone's word for it, ours included. Keep the photos; they're useful when you sell.
1,000+
Roofs repaired, renewed and rebuilt
10 yrs
Written guarantee on every re-roof
5★
The only rating anyone has left us
£0
For the survey and the written quote
Longfield's original village runs along Main Road and Station Road, and Station Road is where you'll find the converted oast houses. Oasts are the trickiest repairs in the parish. Their roofs are steep, the cowls are exposed, and safe access often means proper scaffolding. Elsewhere in the old village, a lot of what we fix is on chimneys and the flashings around them, because a stack on an older house has had decades of frost working at its mortar.
New Barn is mostly residential streets built on the old New Barn Estate, and the repair calls from there are more mixed. Lifted ridge tiles. Gutters choked by leaves from garden trees. Flat roofs on extensions and garages that have done their time. Most of these are quick jobs if they're caught before the water has got into the timber. Leave them a winter and they rarely stay quick.
If you're on your third or fourth repair to the same roof, have a look at what's involved in re-roofing in Longfield before you book another one.
"A lot of the Longfield leaks we trace began months earlier as one lifted tile."
Was it a storm, a slow drip, or a stain that appeared after a frost? Ring 01322 946667 or send the form, and include a photo if you can take one safely from the ground.
If the roof is open to the weather, covering it comes first. A tarpaulin or temporary seal stops the damage spreading while we work out the full repair and get materials together.
We go up and look at the damaged area and everything around it, then into the loft to check felt, battens and timber for water. Storm damage is often wider than it looks from the lawn, so we check the whole slope, not just the gap.
You get a fixed price naming each item: tiles, ridge, verge, lead, labour and access. Other problems we've spotted are listed separately, so the urgent work isn't held up by them.
We find tiles that match yours as closely as possible, from new or reclaimed stock. On an older house, a good match is the difference between a repair you notice and one you don't.
Damaged tiles, battens and felt are replaced, and ridges or verges refixed mechanically where that suits. Lead is dressed back in properly, never just sealed over with mastic and left.
We clear broken tile and dust from the garden, check the gutters, and send you photos of the finished repair next to the ones we took of the damage when we first went up.
10
Years' cover on a new roof
1,000+
Roofing jobs finished
Paperwork in your hand on the last day. Not posted out "in due course".
Re-roof a house in Longfield with us and you get 10 years of cover on the workmanship. It's a written document. It has your address on it, lists what was done, and is dated the day the roof is signed off. If water gets in because something was fitted wrong - a batten, a fixing, a lap, a flashing - a roofer comes back and puts it right. You don't pay for that.
Why are we happy to promise ten years? Because of how the roof goes on. Every tile or slate is mechanically fixed to BS 5534, the current British Standard. Ridges and hips are fixed too, not just sat in mortar. A breathable membrane goes down first. Where a roof meets a wall, a chimney or the house next door, it gets proper lead or a tested dry system. Shortcuts there are what make a guarantee expensive, so we don't take them.
Tiles, slates and membranes also carry the maker's own warranty. Those vary by product, and your paperwork tells you which ones apply. If a job is too unusual to guarantee in the normal way, you'll hear that at quote stage.
If storms keep finding the same weak spots on your roof, it's worth setting a repair against the alternatives. The table lays out the trade-offs for a typical Longfield house.
| Comparison point | Targeted repair | Patch-and-seal | Partial re-roof | Full re-roof |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | £180 - £1,600 depending on the fault | Low, often under £200 | Several thousand, priced by area | £8,000 - £24,000+ by house size |
| How long it lasts | As long as the roof around it, if done right | Months, sometimes a year or two | Decades on the renewed slope | Typically 50+ years, depending on covering |
| Disruption | A few hours from a ladder or tower | An hour or two | Scaffold on one side for several days | Full scaffold, roughly one to two weeks |
| When it makes sense | Sound roof with one clear fault | Stopgap until a proper repair | One slope failed, the other still sound | Battens, felt and fixings failing everywhere |
| Paperwork you get | Written quote, photos and a note of the work | Usually nothing worth keeping | Written quote, building control if over the limits | Written quote and our 10 year guarantee |
| Building regulations | Not needed | Not needed | Needed past 50% of the roof or 25% of the envelope | Building control approval normally required |
Small repairs are usually quick to price once we've seen the roof. These four things make the biggest difference to the figure.
A bungalow or single-storey extension can often be reached from a ladder or a small tower. A two-storey gable, or an oast roof on Station Road, usually needs scaffolding, and the scaffold can easily cost more than the repair itself.
A couple of slipped tiles typically costs £180 to £450 to put right. Once a whole run of verge tiles or a length of ridge has gone, expect something nearer £450 to £1,200 including access.
Common modern tiles are cheap and easy to get hold of. Older or discontinued profiles may need reclaimed stock, which takes longer to find and costs more. We'll tell you the options before ordering anything.
Patching a split in an otherwise sound flat roof is a small job. If the deck has gone soft or the felt is blistered all over, replacing it is better value. A garage roof in EPDM typically runs £1,300 to £2,400.
Ordinary repairs don't. Swapping broken tiles, refixing a ridge or renewing flashing with similar materials needs neither planning permission nor building control. The planning authority for Longfield and New Barn is Dartford Borough Council. The exception is a listed building, where even a repair in different materials may need listed building consent, so if you own a converted oast or an older listed home, check with Dartford first.
It can. Being inland and away from the Thames, Longfield can see more frosty nights than the riverside towns. Water gets into small cracks in older tiles and mortar, freezes, expands and widens them. One winter might do nothing you can see. After several, the tile face flakes off, the ridge mortar crumbles, and a leak shows up in March that really started in December. A look at the roof each autumn catches most of it early.
We're about 14 minutes away by road from west Dartford. After a big storm everyone's phone rings at once, so we put roofs that are open to the weather first and get a temporary cover on them. Smaller jobs, like a single slipped tile with no water getting in, are booked in over the following days. If you can, take a photo of the damage from the garden straight away, before anything else moves. It helps us and your insurer.
Check your policy. Many cover sudden storm damage but exclude wear and tear, so an insurer will want to know whether the wind caused the damage or just exposed an old fault. Our photos and written report set out what we found and what we think caused it. We'll be honest in it, even if that doesn't help the claim. Insurers tend to trust a report that doesn't overstate things.
We look at them case by case. Oast roofs are steep and often have a cowl and a ridge that's hard to reach, so access is the first question. If the building is listed, materials and methods may need approval. We'll survey, tell you straight if it's work we can do well, and say so if it needs a heritage specialist.
Grade II* listed parish church dating from 1343, set in its churchyard in the older part of Longfield. A timber-clad belfry sits on top of the tower.
Learn more about St Mary Magdalene's Church on Google Maps
Forty acres of 18th-century parkland near Meopham, about three miles east of Longfield, once the grounds of Camer House. The council bought it in 1967 and opened it to the public in 1971.
Learn more about Camer Country Park on Google Maps
Motor racing circuit at West Kingsdown, around six miles south-west of Longfield. It hosted the British Grand Prix twelve times between 1964 and 1986, and the 2012 Paralympic road cycling events.
Learn more about Brands Hatch on Google MapsEvery review left for us so far has been five stars. We're adding them here as they come in.
Reviews only tell you so much anyway. When a roofer comes out to Longfield, ask to see photos of a recent job on a house like yours. A good roofer will have plenty and won't mind you asking.
Call 01322 946667 or fill in the form. We'll survey the damage for free and give you a written price, with photos, for the repair your roof needs.