Drone survey in Paignton

Paignton has an enormous stock of Edwardian and inter-war seaside terraces and semis, plus holiday flats and guest houses, and most of them have grown. Back extensions, side returns, dormer conversions and glazed additions were added at different times by different people, and each one created a junction between a new roof and an old one.

Those junctions are where the trouble is. A flat roof meeting a pitched one, a lead flashing chased into a wall that was rendered afterwards, a gutter that now has to carry twice the water it was sized for. All of them are at the back of the building where nobody has looked, and all of them are easy to photograph from above.

Paignton sits on the flat middle of Tor Bay with a long sandy beach and level ground behind it. That is comfortable in the prevailing south-westerly, which the bay shelters, but it offers no protection at all when easterly weather arrives, and salt spray reaches several streets back from the front.

On a flat site the wind hits the whole town at once rather than being broken up by terrain. Shallow-pitched roofs and the flat roofs over guest house extensions are the ones that feel it, because uplift on a shallow pitch is a bigger force than most owners expect.

A guest house or a holiday flat is a business, and a roof failure in July costs bookings as well as repairs. That changes the calculation on inspecting something before it fails rather than after, and it is the reason a good share of Paignton enquiries come in during the winter.

The report also does a second job for commercial stock: it evidences maintenance. If an insurer asks whether a building has been looked at, a dated photographic record with captions is a better answer than a memory of somebody up a ladder a few years back.

Compared with Torquay or Brixham the flying here is straightforward. The ground is level, most properties have a garden, a yard or a car park, and there is usually somewhere to take off that is not the pavement.

The main planning point is the density of the terraces. Photographing one roof in a run of eight means working carefully so the images are of the right property, and it means agreeing before the visit which parts of the roof are yours, which is not always obvious from the street on a continuous terrace.

Goodrington Sands to the south and the rising ground west towards Marldon and Collaton St Mary give the town two quite different edges, and Oldway Mansion sits between them as a reminder of how substantial some of the older buildings here are.

For a TQ3 or TQ4 property the western edge is easier in every respect: more space, less salt, and modern housing with straightforward roof arrangements. The seafront end is where the demanding work is.

Paignton Zoo and the large open sites in the middle of the town are useful landmarks and are planned around rather than flown over, which is straightforward given how much other open ground there is.