RICS Chartered Surveyors in Huddersfield

Two valleys, local stone, and what a slope does to a house

The lower Colne and the ground east of the town centre sit on Coal Measures strata. Climb the valley sides towards Marsden, Meltham or Holme and the sequence changes to the coarser sandstones of the Millstone Grit Group. Huddersfield built out of whatever was directly underfoot, and the quarries at Crosland Hill and Crosland Moor supplied a hard, close grained sandstone that was used for everything from cottage walls to paving flags. You will often find it dressed as smooth ashlar across the front elevation of a villa and left as cheap coursed rubble down the side and back, because the owner paid for the face the street could see. That distinction matters to a surveyor, because the two faces of the same building absorb and shed water at completely different rates and frequently need two different repair strategies.

The slope does more to a Huddersfield house than the stone does. Very little was built on level ground. A house is either cut into the bank or thrown out from it on a plinth, and often both at once, so the rear wall of the ground floor is holding back earth that is at the level of the first floor at the front. Those rear walls were built as house walls, not as engineered retaining structures. There is usually no waterproof barrier behind them, no drainage cavity and no land drain that anyone can now find. Hillside water moves downhill through the fissures in the rock and through the loose material above it, arrives at the back of the building and has nowhere else to go. The classic Huddersfield pattern in a report is a house that reads bone dry at the front and consistently wet across the back, at the same floor level, on the uphill side only.

Then there is the made ground. Cutting a mill, a mill yard and its terraces into a valley side produced a great deal of spoil, and that spoil was tipped and levelled to make the next building plot. Old quarry voids were backfilled the same way. Where a house or a garage sits partly on original rock and partly on fill, the two halves settle differently, and the crack pattern that results is diagonal, tapering and usually oldest at the junction. We will tell you whether what you are looking at is that, or thermal movement in a long unbroken frontage, or something that genuinely needs a structural engineer to model.

Water in the open is the last piece. The Colne and the Holme are short, steep rivers that rise very quickly after heavy rain on the moors, and both filled their valley floors in December 2015, with Brighouse on the Calder below them among the worst hit places in the district. Away from the rivers the risk is different and more common: surface water sheeting off the tops, down the setted streets and into the first property with a threshold below pavement level. The report looks for tide marks, replaced skirtings and floors, salt staining on cellar walls and underfloor vents that have been bricked up, and where the setting calls for it we tell your solicitor to get a flood search rather than assume.

The weaver's cottage, the loom chamber and the taking-in door

Before the mills took the work indoors, cloth was woven at home on a hand loom, and the buildings that housed that trade are still standing in quantity above Golcar, Slaithwaite, Linthwaite, Marsden, Meltham and Honley. The pattern is consistent enough to be diagnostic. The top floor was the working floor, a single open chamber running the depth of the building, and because a hand loom weaver needed daylight on the warp for as many hours as the year allowed, that floor was given a long horizontal band of windows, sometimes six or eight lights side by side, divided by slender stone mullions. Somewhere on the gable or the first floor there is usually a taking-in door: a full height opening, often with no floor or step beneath it, through which finished pieces were lowered to the cart and yarn hauled up.

The window wall is where the survey earns its fee. Structurally, a long run of openings separated by mullions leaves very little solid masonry between the top of the ground floor and the eaves, and the mullions themselves are doing real work. They are slender, they are exposed, and in a great many cottages they have iron cramps or window ties bedded into them. Iron rusts and expands with enormous force inside stone, and the result is a mullion split vertically down its length or sheared off at the head. Once one goes, the lintel or head stone above it loses support and dips, and the usual fix was to slide a concrete lintel across the whole range and render over the evidence. We look at the line of the heads, the verticality of every mullion, the mortar joints above each light and the inside face of that wall, and we say plainly whether the range is stable, tired or actively moving.

Taking-in doors are the second thing we go looking for. Most have been closed up, either with a window or with a stone infill panel, and the infill is very rarely toothed properly into the surrounding masonry. Nothing bonds, so the panel behaves as a separate element and a hairline crack opens down both old reveals, which owners then repeatedly fill. It is usually cosmetic. Occasionally it is not, because removing a door and inserting a window changes the loading across the opening, and we have seen cases where the original timber head was left in place, buried and rotting behind the new work. Where a taking-in door survives in use as a first floor door onto nothing, the report also says something about safety, because that is exactly the sort of feature a buyer forgets about until there is a toddler in the house.

Finally, these cottages are almost never single buildings. They were built in short rows or as pairs sharing a roof, a party wall carried to the ridge and a stack in common, and many have since been knocked through, split back up, extended into the hillside or had the loom chamber converted into bedrooms with dormers cut into a heavy flagged roof. That history is the reason a Level 3 is the right instruction. The question is not only what is wrong today but what was done, when, by whom and with what consent, and only a report that explains causes can answer it.

Defects we see most in Huddersfield homes

Some faults turn up so regularly in this town that a surveyor starts looking for them from the pavement. These are the ones our Huddersfield reports name most often.

• Split and sheared mullions across long first floor window ranges at Golcar, Linthwaite and Slaithwaite, caused by corroded iron cramps expanding inside the stone, with the heads above them propped by a later concrete lintel.
• Infilled taking-in doors that were never bonded into the surrounding wall, showing as a repeatedly filled vertical crack down each old reveal.
• Rear walls holding back hillside ground with no waterproof barrier, no drainage cavity and no traceable land drain, producing damp confined to the uphill rooms while the front of the same house stays dry.
• Yorkshire sliding sash windows with decayed bottom rails and cills, packed out, painted shut and beyond the reach of an off the shelf replacement.
• Impermeable pointing and modern gypsum plaster applied to solid sandstone walls, holding moisture in the thickness instead of letting the wall give it back.
• Roof spread and slipped coverings on tall three storey cottages where dormers were cut into a heavy flagged roof and the original common rafters were trimmed without anything being added back.
• Integral garages driven into the front bank along the valley roads, with retaining side walls and a flat roof used as the drive or terrace above, built with no evidence of design and no maintenance since.
• Mill conversions at Milnsbridge, Lockwood and Folly Hall with very large roof areas, exposed cast iron and timber frames and communal repairs recovered through a service charge you will be paying into.

Buying in Huddersfield: access, consents and the timetable

Instruct as soon as your offer is accepted and your solicitor is on the file. The findings are worth most while you can still act on them, which means before your searches are back and before you have committed to a product. New home owners face an average repair bill of £5,750, and the whole point of a survey is to put that number in front of you while it is still a negotiating position rather than a bill.

Access needs a little more organising here than it does on the flat. We ask the agent for the loft hatch unlocked, the cellar open, the meter cupboards accessible and, critically, the back of the house reachable, because on a hillside plot the rear elevation and the ground behind it tell you more than the frontage does. Many cottages sit hard against the pavement on a narrow lane with nowhere to stand a ladder and nowhere to park, and some of the taller valley terraces cannot be seen safely from the ground at all. Where that is the case we will say so up front and offer a drone roof survey alongside the inspection, so the covering, the flashings, the stack and the valleys are actually looked at rather than described as not inspected.

Consents are a real issue in Huddersfield, which carries an unusually large number of listed buildings for a town of its size. The railway station and its frontage on St George's Square are listed at Grade I, and there are conservation areas covering the town centre, the villas and grounds of Edgerton, and the historic cores of Almondbury, Golcar, Marsden and Slaithwaite. Where a property sits within one, or is listed, the report says so and flags any alteration that looks as though it needed a consent nobody obtained, because unauthorised work on a listed building becomes your problem the day you complete, not the seller's.

Once the inspection is done you can ring the surveyor and talk it through while it is fresh in their mind, and the written report follows within 3 to 5 working days. If something significant comes out of it, movement across a cottage window range for example, or timber decay behind a hillside rear wall, we can carry out the follow up ourselves with a structural engineer's report or a timber and damp report, so you go back to the agent holding evidence and figures instead of anxieties.

Other surveys and valuations we carry out around Huddersfield

Level 2 and Level 3 surveys are the bulk of the work, but they are not all of it. Around Huddersfield we are instructed for structural engineer's reports where a window range or a retaining rear wall is moving, timber and damp reports on hillside and cellared property, drone roof surveys on tall valley terraces and mill conversions, boundary and party wall dispute reports where a stepped garden boundary is doing more retaining than either neighbour realised, asbestos surveys, EPCs and fire risk assessments on converted buildings. For owners and executors we prepare probate valuations, matrimonial valuations, Help to Buy valuations, private valuations and building insurance reinstatement valuations.

The same team covers the wider district from the same base, so Holmfirth, Honley, Meltham, Marsden, Slaithwaite, Golcar and Brighouse are all standard ground for us and travel is inside the fixed fee we quote. On the commercial side we survey shops, offices, mills and industrial units across the Colne and Holme valleys, prepare schedules of condition before a lease starts, advise on dilapidations when one ends, and carry out commercial valuations and rent reviews. The complete list is on our Types of Survey page, and if what you need is not obviously on it, call and describe the property.