Builders in Godalming

Godalming has a deeper layer of history than most of the places we work. The town centre holds a run of buildings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the terraced cottages in Deanery Place go back to the fifteenth century, when they were part of the Rectory Manor. The Pepperpot, the little former town hall in the middle of the High Street, was built in 1814 to replace the medieval market house.

The material that defines the town is Bargate stone, a dark honey coloured sandstone that came out of the Bargate Beds around Godalming and was quarried locally until the Second World War. You see it in walls, plinths and whole elevations across the town. Because the quarries closed, matching it now means reclaimed stone rather than new, and that has to be found and priced properly rather than assumed.

The housing is not all historic. Waverley's own figures show how different the wards are. Holloway is around 64 per cent detached, while Charterhouse is around 35 per cent flats and apartments. Binscombe, which grew up in the medieval period around Binscombe Farm, is a conservation area including the original farmhouse. Around all of that sits the ordinary Victorian, interwar and post war housing that most people actually live in, out through Farncombe and Busbridge.

The town also has an unexpected claim to fame that says something about how it thinks of itself. In 1881 Godalming became arguably the first place in the world with a combined public and private electricity supply.

If you own a period house in Godalming there is a decent chance someone has told you it has rising damp and quoted you for a chemical injection course and new plaster. Sometimes that is right. Often it is not, and the treatment makes the building worse.

Older solid walled buildings were designed to handle moisture by letting it evaporate away through the wall and out through soft lime mortar and breathable finishes. When a building like that is repointed in hard cement, coated in modern masonry paint, or lined with waterproof render, the moisture cannot get out. It goes up and inwards instead, and appears as damp on the inside face.

The usual real causes we find are much duller than rising damp. Ground levels built up above the internal floor over the years. A path or patio bridging the wall. A blocked or leaking gutter soaking one patch of wall. Cement render cracked and holding water behind it. Fixing those is cheaper than a damp proofing contract and it actually works.

We will look at the whole building before recommending anything, and if a specialist damp survey is genuinely needed we will say so. What we will not do is sell you an injected damp course for a wall that needs its gutter clearing.