Roofers Chelsea

A lot of Chelsea's grand white stucco-fronted terraces were built with a parapet wall, a raised wall extending above roof level that hides the entire roofline from the street.

It's a striking, elegant look, and it also means the roof itself, the box gutters, the flashing, and the flat sections behind the parapet, are completely invisible until you're actually up there.

My name's John Quilligan. Roofing has been in my family for three generations, and a parapet roof genuinely handles water differently to a standard eaves roof.

A leak here often traces back to the hidden junction behind the wall, not anywhere visible from ground level, which is exactly why guessing at the cause from outside rarely works on a property like this.

The Royal Hospital Chelsea, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built between 1682 and 1692, is one of the most architecturally significant buildings in London, and still home to the Chelsea Pensioners today. It's a genuinely different era of construction to the Georgian, Victorian, and later housing that makes up most of what we work on across South West London.

Most of Chelsea's residential streets are Georgian, Regency, and Victorian rather than this old, but the area's overall character, and the concentration of listed buildings and conservation protection that comes with it, means checking a property's actual status properly matters more here than in most places we cover.

Behind a parapet wall, water is usually carried away through a box gutter, a channel built into the roof itself rather than a standard gutter hanging off the edge.

Box gutters are prone to specific problems: they can be harder to inspect, debris collects in them without being visible from the ground, and if one fails, water can track along the parapet wall itself before it ever shows up inside the property.

We treat box gutter and parapet work as its own specialism, not a standard gutter job with a different name. A property with this kind of roofline needs checking properly, not assumed to behave like a standard pitched roof with visible eaves.

My property has a parapet wall and I can't see the roof at all. How do you inspect it? We go up and check it properly, including the box gutters and flashing behind the parapet, since none of this is visible from the street or even from most windows. Assuming a parapet roof is fine because nothing looks wrong from outside is exactly how small problems turn into bigger ones.

What's a box gutter, and why does mine keep blocking? It's a channel built into the roof itself, behind the parapet wall, rather than a gutter hanging off the edge of the roof. Debris collects in it without being visible from the ground, and it needs checking specifically rather than assumed to be clear.

Is my property likely to be listed or in a conservation area? A significant amount of Chelsea falls under some form of conservation protection given the area's history and architecture. We check this for your specific property during the free inspection.

How quickly can you get someone out? Same day in most cases, seven days a week.

Do you charge for the inspection? No. No call-out fee, ever, regardless of what the inspection finds.