New build snagging survey in Taunton

Taunton's growth is not concentrated in one direction the way it is in most of the towns on this list. The dataset is specific: continuing major new development on all four sides of the town, on top of the very large post-war and late twentieth century estates already surrounding the Georgian and Victorian centre. Whichever side of Taunton a plot sits on, it is one of several active growth fronts rather than a single defined estate.

That scale of simultaneous building, across multiple developers and multiple sites at once, is exactly the environment in which a repeated shortcut on one phase can go unnoticed for longer: there is simply more new roofing going up across the town at any given time for any one inspector to keep an eye on.

Taunton sits on the flat floor of the Vale of Taunton Deane, ringed by the Quantocks, Blackdowns and Brendon Hills, which gives it more shelter and less rainfall than most of Devon. The trade-off is that the vale is low-lying and holds fog and frost readily, and the surrounding hills produce localised gusting in storms rather than the steady, predictable wind of a more open site.

Localised gusting is harder to plan for than constant wind, because it can hit one part of an estate and not another depending on which hillside is channelling it that day. A ridge or verge system tested against average conditions rather than gust loading is a real risk in a setting like this.

Whichever of Taunton's four growth fronts a plot belongs to, the booking process is the same: an address, the defects period end date, and a fixed price back covering travel anywhere in and around the town.

Taunton's postcode area runs TA1 to TA4, reflecting how much ground the county town actually covers. Taunton Castle, Vivary Park and the County Cricket Ground sit close to the historic centre, useful landmarks for orientation, but with major development on all four sides of the town, naming which side, north, south, east or west, speeds up planning the flight considerably.

Wellington, Bridgwater, Chard and Minehead, all covered elsewhere on this site, surround Taunton within the Vale of Taunton Deane and the wider county, and a plot near any of those boundaries is worth checking against the neighbouring page too, since the specific balance of shelter and fog varies from one side of the vale to the other.