Working on Swansea's older buildings
Swansea's nineteenth-century growth as a metalworking and maritime town left it with steep streets of Victorian terraces in Uplands, Brynmill, Mount Pleasant and St Thomas — solid-wall houses that rely on breathable finishes to cope with weather blowing straight off the bay. Wartime bombing took much of the town centre, so the city's older fabric is concentrated in those suburbs and in the settlements around them: Mumbles, with its seafront terraces and cottages, and the farmhouses, longhouses and limestone cottages of the Gower villages beyond. Add the chapels found in almost every community and the surviving maritime buildings near the docks, and Swansea has a more varied stock of lime-built structures than it is usually given credit for.
Exposure is the recurring theme here. Rubble-stone cottages on Gower and rendered terraces facing the sea take serious weather, and hard cement renders fail on them quickly — cracking, holding water against the stone and accelerating the very decay they were meant to prevent. Inside, gypsum over old lime backgrounds in a damp maritime climate rarely lasts. Chapels bring a further set of issues: large areas of lime plaster at height, often water-damaged from failed rainwater goods, needing repair rather than replacement. A lime specification suits all of these buildings because it is what they were designed around.
What we do in Swansea
- Lime plastering — repair and re-plastering of terraces, cottages and chapel interiors
- Lime rendering — weathering coats for exposed coastal and rural walls
- Lime pointing — repointing rubble stone and brick in lime after cement has failed
- Limecrete floors — breathable replacement floors for cottages and farmhouses with damp solid floors
- Full renovation of period and listed buildings, from a single elevation to a complete house
Listed buildings and conservation on Gower and in Swansea
The Gower peninsula was the first place in Britain to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and its villages hold a good number of listed cottages, farmhouses and churches; the wider city has conservation areas and listed buildings of its own, including many chapels. Works affecting a listed building normally need consent from Swansea Council, and traditional materials matched to the original fabric are what that process generally expects. Repairing in lime keeps a building on the right side of those requirements while also being the technically correct choice for its walls.
Nearby areas we also cover
As well as the city and Mumbles, we take on work across the Gower villages — Bishopston, Reynoldston and Llangennith among them — and in Gorseinon, Pontarddulais, Neath, Port Talbot and across to Llanelli and the Carmarthenshire side.