Around 60,000 buildings in the UK have thatched roofs, most of them in the south and west of England — Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. They are the standard image of the English village, and they are working buildings rather than museum pieces.
The materials
Three main types, and the regional differences are real:
- Water reed — the most durable, lasting 25 to 40 years. Traditional in East Anglia, where it is cut from the Norfolk Broads, and now often imported from eastern Europe and Turkey.
- Combed wheat reed — wheat straw with the grain and leaf removed, laid so only the cut ends show. The West Country standard, lasting 25 to 35 years.
- Long straw — wheat straw laid with stems running in both directions, giving a shaggier, more rounded look with a distinctive hazel-rod trim along the edges. Traditional in the south and east, and the shortest-lived at 15 to 25 years.
A trained eye can identify a region from the roof, and conservation officers care about it — a listed thatched building normally has to be rethatched in the material and style it already has.
Medieval straw
One of the more remarkable facts in British building. Thatch is often layered rather than stripped: a thatcher removes the weathered top and adds a new coat over the surviving base.
On some roofs in Devon and Somerset that base has been dated by scientists to the fifteenth century, making it the oldest surviving plant material on any building in Britain. Those base coats carry preserved smoke blackening from open hearths, and pollen and insect remains that are of genuine scientific value.
The ridge
The decorative pattern along the top of the roof is the thatcher’s signature. Block-cut ridges with scalloped edges, cross-hatched patterning, and the occasional figure — a pheasant, a fox, a cat — perched on the apex. The straw figure is a straightforward advertisement, and thatchers are known locally by their animals.
The practicalities
Owning a thatched cottage is not a low-maintenance proposition:
- Insurance costs considerably more, because of fire risk, and often requires specialist cover.
- Chimney fires are the principal danger, and fire brigades recommend annual sweeping and lined flues. Wood burners installed without proper flue insulation have caused a number of losses.
- Wire netting is fitted over most roofs to keep birds from pulling the thatch apart.
- Rethatching runs to tens of thousands of pounds, and most cottages are listed, which restricts what may be done.
The craft
There are around a thousand working thatchers in Britain, trained through apprenticeship, and the trade is neither dying nor comfortable — demand is steady, but the supply of suitable long straw has fallen as modern short-stemmed wheat varieties replaced the old ones. Some growers now cultivate heritage wheat specifically for thatching.
It is one of the few genuinely pre-industrial crafts still practised commercially in Britain at scale, and a thatcher at work on a scaffold is a common enough sight in the south-west to go unremarked locally and photographed constantly by everyone else.