A construction background, then a camera close enough to read the mortar

The background is construction rather than photography, which turns out to matter for a chimney stack more than most parts of a house. Knowing why flaunching cracks on one side of a pot and not the other, or what a stained brick course two feet below a flashing actually points to, is the difference between a set of good-looking photographs and a report that tells a sweep or a roofer where to start.

The recurring problem, working alongside roofers and chimney sweeps on Hembury Contracting jobs, was always the same one: a customer had been told a stack needed work, based on a look from the garden, and had no way to check that for themselves before agreeing to scaffolding. A close photograph of the actual pot, the actual flaunching, the actual brickwork, answers that question in a way a description from the pavement never quite does.

Plenty of drone operators can fly close to a building. Fewer have stood on enough scaffolding themselves to know that a stained brick is not automatically a structural problem, or that a pot leaning slightly in a photograph taken at an angle is sometimes just the angle. Reading the images against what is actually true about how a stack fails is most of the value in the report.

Everything is flown from Exeter, which puts most of Devon inside an hour. The South West is the patch because it is home, and because the older terraced and Victorian stock this region carries, tall brick stacks on narrow terraces, rendered Georgian stacks on market town frontages, salt-worn stacks on seaside parapets, is exactly the kind of building a stack survey is built for.