Drone survey in Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis is built into a landslip coast that is still moving, and that is the fact which separates it from every other town on this list. Buildings here take distortion from below as well as weather from above, and the first place it shows is in the geometry of the roof.

A ridge line that is no longer straight, a flashing that has opened at one end only, a slope that has developed a dip, a chimney that has gone out of plumb: those are ground movement signals rather than roofing failures, and they need a structural opinion rather than a roofer. Photographs taken square on from the air make them visible, because the eye can compare a ridge against the horizon in a way it cannot from a steep street below.

The historic core is a dense run of cottages and Georgian townhouses on near-vertical streets, with Victorian villas on the upper slopes and modern housing inland. Slate hanging appears on the exposed elevations for the same reason it does elsewhere on this coast, and flat roofs turn up on cliffside extensions where there was nowhere else to go.

Access here is as difficult as anywhere in the South West. Scaffolding a building on a street that a van cannot easily get up is a serious undertaking, and it is why establishing whether there is a problem at all is worth doing separately from fixing it.

Open to the south west with the sea immediately below, the town takes salt and driving rain in the ordinary way of this coast. The Cobb shelters the harbour rather than the town, so the buildings above it are fully exposed.

Combined with the ground movement, that produces failures at the junctions: where a wall meets a roof, where an old building meets a newer extension, where a repair meets original fabric. Those junctions are where both the weather and the movement do their work.

A survey here often ends up in front of a structural engineer as well as a roofer, and sometimes in front of an insurer too. That is a good reason for the report to be careful about what it claims: it records what is visible and says plainly where something needs a different expert.

Repeat records have particular value on a moving coast. Two sets of images a year apart show whether something is progressing, which a single visit never can.

The Cobb shelters the harbour and nothing much shelters the town, and inland at Uplyme and along the Charmouth road the modern housing sits on more stable ground away from the active slip.

For a DT7 owner that distinction is the single most useful piece of local information. A property on the historic slopes needs its geometry watched over time, and a modern house inland is an ordinary survey subject with ordinary findings.

The fossil beaches and the Undercliff also mean the coast here attracts a great many visitors, so flights near the front are arranged for quieter hours as a matter of practicality.