Drone survey in Torquay

Torquay's Victorian and Edwardian villas and hotels were built to be seen from the front and from a distance. They carry rendered elevations, elaborate roofscapes, mansards, parapets, lead-lined parapet gutters and turrets, on buildings that are often four storeys before the roof even starts.

Nobody looks at those. A ladder does not reach, a tower is a road closure and a scaffold is a five figure decision, so the usual sequence is that a leak appears on a top floor ceiling and somebody starts guessing. From the air the whole arrangement is visible in twenty minutes, including the parts of a parapet gutter that no ladder position in the world would reveal.

A large share of those villas and hotels are now flats. That produces the specific Torquay situation where a roof covers eight households, the water comes into one of them, and the cost is shared by all of them under a lease nobody has read recently.

In that situation a survey is less about finding the defect and more about producing something everybody can look at together. A set of captioned photographs is a neutral document. It also stops the conversation being about whose flat is affected and moves it to what the roof actually needs.

The bay gives shelter from the prevailing south-westerly, which is exactly why the town grew as a resort. What it does not shelter from is easterly weather, which comes straight in across Tor Bay, and salt reaches the whole seafront regardless of direction.

Buildings detailed for south-westerly weather can be caught out by that. Verges, flashings and pointing on the eastern faces of a building take a beating that the western faces never see, and on a tall Victorian roof those are the elevations that are hardest to inspect from the ground.

The town is built across seven limestone hills around the harbour, so almost every street has a gradient and many properties sit on terraced or retained plots. Take off ground is usually available, but it is rarely level and it is rarely directly below the part of the roof that matters.

That is worth knowing when you compare a flight to other access options: the same gradient that makes a scaffold expensive here has very little effect on what an aircraft can photograph, because it simply flies to the height it needs rather than being built up to it.

Babbacombe and Oddicombe sit on the cliff side of Torquay where the ground falls away hard to the sea, and the properties there are as exposed as anything in the bay despite the general shelter the bay provides.

For a TQ1 address on that side the survey findings tend towards the coastal pattern: wind damage at ridges and verges, salt on the fixings and render that has taken more than its share. Properties around the harbour and inland behave quite differently.

Torre Abbey and the older parts of the town add historic fabric to the mix, and flights near significant buildings are planned rather than improvised as a matter of course.