Drone services in Sidmouth

Sidmouth has kept more of its Regency and early Victorian core than almost anywhere else on this coast, and that is a roofing question as much as an architectural one. Rendered and painted elevations, ornate ironwork, complex geometry, lead-lined valleys and parapet gutters: a great deal of the water on these buildings is handled by details that are hidden from the street by design.

A hidden gutter that fails does not drip outside. It fills, backs up, and comes through a ceiling somewhere inside, which is why the first symptom is usually indoors and the cause is usually forty feet up and out of sight.

Ironwork is part of the same story. Balconies, canopies and railings are a defining feature of the town and they are fixed into elevations that take salt air, so the condition of a fixing behind a painted bracket is a legitimate question and not a cosmetic one.

The town sits in a steep valley at the mouth of the Sid with Peak Hill on one side and Salcombe Hill on the other, both well over 150 metres. That funnels wind off the sea straight up the town and makes conditions around ridges and chimneys turbulent and gusty rather than steady.

It matters twice over. It explains why fixings and flashings on the higher elevations work loose faster than the sheltered valley position suggests, and it means flights here are planned for calmer parts of the day rather than squeezed into any dry hour.

Salt reaches the esplanade properties hard, so metalwork, fixings and painted render on the front need looking at more often than anything a mile inland. Further up the valley and out towards Sidbury the stock changes again into thatch and older cottages, with a completely different set of questions.

One town, two maintenance regimes. It is a good example of why a survey should be booked on what the building is rather than on the name of the place it stands in.

There is a practical consequence for booking. Two properties a few hundred metres apart, one on the front and one up the valley, may need entirely different times of day and different weather to photograph usefully, so a single visit does not always cover both.

The other half of the local workload is photography. The esplanade, Connaught Gardens, the red cliffs and the Jurassic Coast frontage make this a town that sells on how it looks, and hotels, holiday lets and higher value property here all benefit from images that show the setting.

Cliff-top and coast path flights need more planning than a back garden does, because of the drop, the footpath traffic and the protected status of much of the frontage. That is preparation rather than an obstacle, but it is real and it is done in advance.