Six kinds of Croydon roof, from Victorian slate to new towers
Croydon is not one housing stock, it is six, and each of them fails differently.
Around the town centre and Addiscombe sit Victorian and Edwardian terraces alongside larger houses of the same period, a great many of which were divided into flats decades ago. Those conversions are where roof responsibility gets complicated, because the covering, the parapet and the rainwater goods usually belong to the freeholder while the leak is reported by whoever lives on the top floor.
Broad Green, Selhurst, South Norwood and Norbury carry denser Victorian and Edwardian terracing: narrower plots, slate front slopes, shared party walls and rear additions with flat roofs behind them.
Park Hill has the Wates estates built in the 1960s and 1970s, a different proposition again, with flat and shallow-pitch roofs designed as a system across a group of buildings rather than house by house.
Out towards Shirley and Waddon the stock turns interwar: semi-detached houses with concrete interlocking tile, hipped roofs and the deep eaves of the period. Postwar housing and blocks fill in between.
Then there is the town centre itself, where regeneration has added new residential towers including Saffron Square and Ten Degrees. Those are managed buildings with large flat and podium roofs, and they are maintained on schedules rather than repaired when someone notices a stain.