Areas We Cover

Sunspire works from Chelmsford and travels thirty miles by road in every direction, which takes the coverage across most of Essex and over the boundary into Hertfordshire, Suffolk and the London fringe. The places above are grouped by district and by river geography rather than by distance, because that is how the housing actually falls.

Thirty miles by road, not as the crow flies

The radius is measured on the road because a van carrying glass and a tower travels roads, not straight lines. Thirty miles of Essex tarmac from Chelmsford reaches the Suffolk border above Sible Hedingham, the estuary villages of the Blackwater and the Dengie to the east, the Thames corridor towns to the south, and across into Hertfordshire in the west. A place fifteen miles away down the A12 is a shorter working day than somewhere ten miles off across the lanes, and the grouping above reflects that.

Why the town changes the job more than the county does

Essex stock is unusually varied for one county, and the covering on the roof decides the method more than any preference does. Victorian brick terraces in the older cores of Chelmsford and Colchester carry plain clay tile or slate at a steep pitch. The interwar and post war commuter suburbs are hipped concrete interlocking tile, deep in profile and needing a kit made for that depth. White weatherboard runs through the Blackwater villages and around Stock. Timber frame and pargeting sit under old, uneven roofs at Thaxted, Coggeshall and Saffron Walden, where the rafters are rarely where a tape measure expects them.

Then there are the planned estates. Great Notley, South Woodham Ferrers, Beaulieu Park and most of Basildon and Harlow are trussed rafter roofs, where the webs are engineered components carrying load and the opening is sized to fit between trusses rather than through them. Harlow and Basildon also carry an enormous quantity of flat roof, and out on Canvey the bungalows sit on reclaimed land with their own settlement history. Each of those conditions changes the detailing, the access and the day rate, which is the whole reason these pages are written town by town.

Picking the page that matches your roof

The nearest town is usually the right page, but if your house has more in common with a village five miles further out, read that one instead. The covering and the pitch are better guides than the postcode. Where a job sits near the outer edge of the thirty miles, it is still worth asking, because the road matters more than the map. The guides cover the technical decisions in depth once you know which roof you are dealing with.