Working on Gloucester's older buildings
Few cities pack as much building history into a small centre as Gloucester. Around the cathedral and the gate streets there are Tudor and earlier timber-framed buildings, often hiding behind later frontages, alongside Georgian townhouses of brick and stone. At the docks, the Victorian warehouses are a reminder of the city's trading past, and the residential streets that spread out in the nineteenth century left Gloucester with a very large stock of Victorian terraces — solid brick walls, lime-plastered inside, many now suffering under decades of gypsum skims and impermeable paints.
Within easy reach of the city sit the Cotswold-stone villages, and here the case for lime is at its clearest. Cotswold limestone was quarried, built and pointed with lime made from the same rock; the stone and the mortar are chemically at home together. Repoint a limestone wall in hard cement and the joints stop breathing, moisture exits through the stone instead, and the face of the stone begins to powder and spall — damage that cannot be undone. In the city the pattern differs but the principle holds: solid-walled Victorian brick was never meant to be sealed, and the damp problems that follow gypsum and cement repairs are usually cured by putting lime back rather than by injecting anything.
What we do in Gloucester
- Lime plastering — three-coat work on brick and stone, and lime on lath in timber-framed buildings
- Lime rendering — breathable renders for solid-wall houses and rubble stone
- Lime pointing — matched lime mortars for Cotswold limestone, city brick and dockside masonry
- Limecrete floors — insulated, breathable floor replacements for period houses
- Full renovation of period and listed buildings, from a single storey to a complete house
Listed buildings and conservation areas in and around Gloucester
Gloucester's historic core contains many listed buildings and lies within conservation areas, and the villages of the surrounding countryside — particularly on the Cotswold edge — are rich in listed stone houses and cottages. If your building is listed, works that affect its character, including stripping or replacing plaster, render and pointing, will generally need listed building consent, and repair in matching lime materials is the standard expectation. In conservation areas, changes to external finishes can also need approval. We keep our proposals straightforward for these processes: compatible materials, conservative repair, and method statements when the application calls for them.
Nearby areas we also cover
From Gloucester we work across the county and its edges: Cheltenham, Tewkesbury, Stroud and the valleys, Painswick and the Cotswold villages, Newent and the orchard country towards Ledbury, and the Forest of Dean towns including Newnham, Cinderford and Coleford on our route back towards South Wales.