Thermal imaging survey in Lyme Regis

Lyme Regis's core is a dense arrangement of cottages and Georgian townhouses on near-vertical streets, solid wall throughout with slate hanging used on the more exposed elevations, a weatherproofing measure rather than an insulating one, in the same way as at Totnes. Victorian villas occupy the upper slopes, and modern housing inland towards Uplyme and the Charmouth road carries the town's newest construction, a smaller share of the total stock than in most other towns on this list given how constrained the historic centre's steep site leaves for later development.

Flat roofs on cliffside extensions are a specific and recurring feature here, added where a steep plot makes a conventional pitched addition impractical, and those flat sections are read with the same moisture-focused approach as any flat roof elsewhere in this coverage area rather than folded into the general solid-wall picture around them.

The town is open to the south-west with the sea at the foot of the town, and salt and wind work on the old solid walls the way they do at any exposed South West coastal town on this list. What sets Lyme Regis apart is the active landslip coast it sits on: ground movement adds structural distortion to buildings here in a way that most other towns simply do not contend with, and that distortion shows up first in ridge lines and flashings, which can complicate a thermal reading by introducing gaps and misalignments that have a structural rather than a purely insulation-related cause.

For a thermal survey, that means a finding here is read with the town's specific ground conditions in mind: a warm patch that would suggest a straightforward insulation gap elsewhere might, on a building affected by ground movement, indicate a structural opening that needs a different kind of attention entirely, and the report is written to make that distinction rather than assume the more common cause automatically applies.

The steep streets are flown from a careful stand-off distance given the gradient, and a dawn flight after a cold, still night gives the clearest reading across the historic core.

For cliffside flat roof extensions, an evening flight after a bright day is the better window, following the same moisture-reading logic used for any flat roof elsewhere on this site.

The Lyme Regis Museum and the streets around it sit among the steepest and most exposed of the town's historic cottages, while properties set back along the fossil beaches path towards Charmouth take a slightly different angle of exposure to the harbour-facing stock directly above the Cobb. That variation in exposure across a actually small town is significant enough that a survey booking benefits from naming roughly which part of the historic core a property sits in, harbour-facing, museum-side, or set back towards the coast path, before a flight date is agreed.