Structural surveys on Victorian and older property

A Victorian house has been standing for well over a century, which is the single most useful piece of structural evidence about it. It has survived every winter, every dry summer, every load anyone has put on it, and it is still here. That is not proof that nothing is wrong, but it is a much better starting position than a modern building has earned.

The purpose of a structural survey on a house of this age is not to list everything that is not to modern standard - almost nothing in it is. It is to separate the characteristics of the age from the defects that matter.

What is normal in a Victorian house

All of the following are ordinary, and none of them is a reason to walk away from a purchase:

• Shallow foundations - often a simple footing a few courses deep, sometimes barely anything. It is how they were built and most of them settled long ago and stopped.
• Sloping floors and out-of-square door frames, from that early settlement plus a century of timber shrinkage
• Lime mortar, which is softer than modern cement and is meant to be. It accommodates movement and lets the wall breathe, and repointing it in hard cement causes problems rather than solving them.
• Solid walls with no cavity, which is why damp behaves differently and why insulating them needs thought
• Old cracking, decorated over repeatedly, with dirt-filled edges
• Timber lintels concealed behind plaster or render
• Chimney breasts in most rooms, some of them removed at some point by somebody
• Cellars, often damp, often with limited headroom, frequently with a coal chute

What an engineer actually looks at

The inspection concentrates on the places where this construction genuinely does fail:

• Bay windows - the classic Victorian defect. Bays were frequently built on shallower and lighter foundations than the main house, and they settle away from it. Vertical cracking at the junction between bay and main wall is one of the most common findings there is, and it is very often historic.
• Joist ends where they bear into external walls, which is where damp and decay concentrate. Bouncing or soft floors near an external wall are the clue.
• Chimney breast removals - whether the stack above is actually supported, and by what
• Roof structure - purlins, rafters and whether the roof has spread and pushed the tops of walls outwards, particularly under heavy stone slates
• Gable walls on end-of-terrace properties, which are tall, exposed on one side, and the most likely wall in a terrace to bow
• Lintels over openings, especially any opening that has been widened
• Previous alterations - a removed wall, a knocked-through reception room, a loft used as a room - and whether any of it was ever designed
• Drainage, because Victorian drains are old and washout from a defective drain is one of the more common causes of genuine localised subsidence

Old or active: the question that matters

Almost every structural question on a Victorian house reduces to this. The building has moved. Everyone knows it has moved. The question is whether it is still moving.

The evidence is the same as anywhere: whether cracking is fresh or decorated over, whether previous repairs have themselves moved, whether doors that were eased have started binding again, whether there is corroborating distortion outside, and - where it cannot be settled in one visit - monitoring across a full seasonal cycle.

In our experience the answer on a Victorian terrace is very often that the movement finished decades ago. Getting that in writing is frequently the whole value of the survey, because it is what a lender, a buyer or a nervous owner needs.

Buying one

If you are buying, a RICS Level 3 building survey is usually the right general instrument for a property of this age. If it flags something structural - and on a Victorian house it often will - a structural engineer answers that specific question. Going straight to an engineer makes sense when you already know what the concern is.

The costs are worth putting side by side. Published comparison guides put a Level 3 building survey somewhere around £600 to £1,500. Our structural survey and report is a fixed £580 + VAT with the report inside 10 working days of the inspection, guaranteed - which is the number that matters when you are working to an exchange date.

Altering one

Victorian houses take alteration well, which is why so many have been altered. The engineering care goes into respecting how they carry load: solid walls behave differently from cavity walls, a chimney breast may be doing more than it looks, and a detail designed for a modern semi is not transferable.

The two most common instructions are opening up the ground floor and converting the loft, and both are entirely achievable. What they need is calculations that reflect what the building actually is, adequate bearings and padstones, and Building Control approval with a completion certificate at the end - the absence of which is one of the most common reasons a period house sale stalls at the enquiries stage.