Chapter 3: The House that Fagg built

As for the main roof structure, this is of ridged form, with one ridge covering the front rooms of the house and two ridges extending back from this at right angles, the north-easterly of which then reduces in height towards the rear of the building (for extensions to accommodate extra rooms at the back, see chapter 4, below). Between the two ridges extending backwards is a wide leaded gulley, and there are also leaded gulleys behind the front parapet of the house and to the side, where there was perhaps originally a further parapet prior to the construction of Exmouth Cottage. Originally, the front gulley was shaped so that it drained into what was probably originally an open lead gulley at the centre, which entered the roof space above the French windows to the upstairs central room, and then passed backwards into the attic space, prior to turning at right angles and draining halfway down the north side of the house. At some later date the gulley was altered to a pipe, the aperture to which was prone to get blocked with leaves and debris left there by seagulls, necessitating a rather perilous ascent onto the roof to clear the blockage. For this reason, the whole arrangement was done away with in 2002, when the front gulley was instead reshaped to drain into a hopper at the end of the front parapet. On the inner side of the south-west section of the roof is a large skylight, which was renewed in 1991 (and then again in 2021) to match the existing, which was presumably original.

Rear view of chimneys

Penetrating through the roof were various chimneys, which probably took much the same form as that to which they have been restored since 1991. These linked to fireplaces in the ground-floor front and rear rooms on the south-west side of the house and the front room on the north-east side, those in the front rooms still retaining their original Regency marble surrounds (for the replacement of that in the rear south-westerly room, see chapter 7, below; the upstairs ones had long been removed prior to their reinstatement in the 1990s). The large stack that stood at the point where the roof structure narrows towards the rear of the house evidently served a large range in an alcove in what is now the dining room on the ground floor and presumably also fireplaces in the upstairs rooms, though these have long since been done away with.