Drone surveys in Teignmouth, flown by the surveyor who writes them

Almost every roof in Devon was detailed by people thinking about weather from the south west, because that is where it usually comes from. Teignmouth is one of the places where that assumption fails. The town is directly exposed to easterly gales driving up the Channel, and easterly weather finds the laps, the abutments and the flashing details that decades of prevailing wind never tested.

That is worth knowing before a survey rather than after it. On an east facing elevation here the things to photograph closely are the ones nobody worries about elsewhere: the upwind edge of a lap, the side abutment of a dormer, the head of a flashing where it was tucked rather than wedged, and the verge on the wrong side of the roof.

Georgian and Regency terraces run along the front, with Victorian villas on the slopes behind and seafront apartment conversions between them. Rendered parapets and cornices are everywhere, and flat roofs sit behind them on the conversions.

Conversions are their own category. A building carved into flats over a century acquires additional soil pipes, extra rooflights, new flat sections over what used to be a rear yard, and a maintenance history split between several owners who each look after their own bit. From above that reads immediately: you can see which sections have been redone, which have not, and where two different periods of work meet badly.

Higher up at Broadmeadow and towards the Bishopsteignton road the post-war housing is simpler, mostly concrete tile, and the surveys there are usually about a specific problem rather than a general condition question.

Salt reaches the whole front here, and the railway sea wall regularly overtops in storms, which puts sea water onto ground level structures as well as spray onto the roofs above. On a survey that means corrosion is a first order finding rather than a footnote: ferrous fixings, cast iron rainwater goods, steel lintels behind render, and any galvanised detail on a flat roof.

The Ness across the water and the estuary mouth give the town a particular wind pattern. The red sandstone headland breaks the flow and produces turbulence on the seaward side of the town that does not show up in a forecast. In practice that means a flight here is set up with the aircraft kept where it can be seen and recovered easily, rather than pushed for the last ten metres of a shot.

Teignmouth is a working port as well as a seafront town, and the estuary side has a different building stock from the sea side: commercial sheds, quay structures and buildings that take their weather off the water rather than off the Channel.

The ferry, the Shaldon bridge and the estuary itself all sit in the middle of the town's geography, which matters for flight planning more than for roofing. Water, boats and a busy crossing are all things to be over or near deliberately rather than by accident, and they are checked at the desk stage.