New build snagging survey in Torquay

Torquay is built across seven limestone hills around a sheltered harbour, so almost every plot has a gradient, and its grand Victorian and Edwardian villas and hotels are firmly the town's dominant character. New building here is mostly modern seafront apartment development, alongside smaller estate infill inland from the coast, rather than one large new-build phase.

A modern apartment block brings flat roof sections, parapets, balconies and terrace waterproofing to check, in addition to any pitched sections, all of it several storeys up on a hillside site where a scaffold tower has to be built on a slope rather than level ground.

The bay gives Torquay real shelter from the prevailing south-westerly, which is precisely why it grew into a resort in the first place. It offers no such protection from an easterly, which comes straight in off the Channel, and salt reaches the whole seafront when it does. A new apartment development facing the bay is trading exposure on one axis for exposure on another, not escaping it.

A parapet or a flat roof several storeys up on a hillside apartment block is one of the harder things in this entire network to inspect physically: access equipment has to cope with the slope as well as the height. An aerial survey removes both problems at once, covering the roof, the parapets and every terrace at the same standoff distance regardless of what the ground underneath is doing.

Torquay's postcode area runs TQ1 to TQ2. Torre Abbey and the harbour sit at the town's historic heart, with Babbacombe and Oddicombe further round the coast and Kents Cavern inland, useful reference points across a town built over seven separate limestone hills, where a plot's exact position changes both its gradient and its wind exposure.

Paignton, Brixham, Newton Abbot and Teignmouth, all covered elsewhere on this site, share the wider Tor Bay and South Devon coastal setting, and a new apartment development near any of Torquay's boundaries is worth checking against the neighbouring page too, since the bay's shelter from the south-west does not extend evenly to every part of the coastline around it.

Clay plain tile and flat or mansard roofing both turn up on Torquay's newer apartment developments, closer in character to the elaborate Victorian roofscapes nearby than a plain volume-built estate elsewhere in Devon, and worth checking with the same care given to any complex, multi-level roof.