Plasterer in Walmley

Walmley lies on the south-eastern side of Sutton Coldfield, inside the City of Birmingham but with the feel of a separate village. Plants Brook runs along its western and southern side through the New Hall Valley, Minworth and the A38 are to the east, Falcon Lodge and Reddicap Heath to the north, and Pype Hayes and Erdington to the south. A century ago it was a church, an inn and some scattered houses on a country road. Today it is one of the largest suburbs in the Royal Town, built mostly after the Second World War around a much older pattern of halls, farms and lanes. RCR Connections Ltd is Birmingham based, covering the whole of the Midlands. Walmley is a short drive for us, whether you need a single ceiling fixed in a 1960s semi off Walmley Ash Road or a whole house plastered on one of the newer roads.

This page goes into detail. The first part looks at how Walmley came to be, because the age of a house here tells you a lot about what is behind its plaster. The middle part takes each era of building in turn and explains the problems we expect and the way we would deal with them. The last part is practical: permission, damp, getting ready, and what happens when the plasterers arrive.

Free, no-obligation quote in Walmley: WhatsApp me on 07453 614095 with a few photos, or send us a message.

Before the suburb

A hamlet of Sutton

Nobody knows exactly when Walmley began. The Victoria County History of Warwickshire calls it one of the hamlets of Sutton Coldfield, alongside Maney, and local accounts suggest it may have grown up as a cluster of homes for people working at the halls nearby: New Hall, Langley Hall, Penns Hall and Peddimore Hall. A small settlement called Langley, on what is now Fox Hollies Road, is mentioned in Domesday, but it was never more than a hamlet without a church or an inn.

The halls around it

What makes the Walmley area unusual is how many old houses of status survive within a short walk. The county history describes New Hall as standing inside a rectangular moat that washes its walls on three sides. It says the house is believed to date from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, with very ancient grey-white masonry in its west range and south wing, and a north wing with a great banqueting hall in red sandstone added late in the sixteenth century. New Hall is often described as the oldest inhabited moated house in Britain, though that is a claim rather than something that can be proved. Peddimore Hall, about a mile south of Langley Hall, is a moated house of around 1660 in red brick with sandstone dressings, its doorway carved with the motto DEVS NOSTER REFVGIVM. Langley Hall itself is an eighteenth-century brick house, with the remains of a medieval moat nearby.

Farms of brick, stone and roughcast

The same county history picks out several farmhouses in this south-eastern corner of the parish. Warrenhouse Farm, north of Walmley, has roughcast walls, a seventeenth-century chimney stack and a red brick wing with a stone dated 1671. New Shipton Farm is a late seventeenth-century brick house with an older timber-framed barn. Wiggins Hill Farm, further south-east, has early seventeenth-century brickwork with sandstone quoins below and later brick above with curved “Dutch” gables. The Mill House, just off the road from Wylde Green to Walmley, is an eighteenth-century brick house with a lower wing showing old timber framing. A cottage at the bend of the same road, west of the mill, is built of red sandstone rubble with stone mullioned windows and is dated by the history to around 1600.

Wincelle

On Wylde Green Road, overlooking the New Hall Valley, stands Wincelle, a timber-framed house that was moved here from Wiggins Hill. Accounts differ about its date. Some describe it as a fifteenth-century house taken down and put back up in 1910. The county history says it was rebuilt using seventeenth-century material said to have come from Wiggins Hill. Either way, it is one of the more remarkable buildings in the area, and its name is the old form of Wigginshill.

Bishop Vesey and the stone cottages

John Vesey, Bishop of Exeter and Sutton Coldfield’s great benefactor in the sixteenth century, is credited with building a series of stone cottages around the parish. One of those linked with Walmley is the ford keeper’s house beside Plants Brook, which let travellers cross the ford on Wylde Green Road safely. It is now listed.

Plants Brook and the mill

Plants Brook was once called the Ebrook. In the thirteenth century, according to the county history, William de Beauchamp granted the Arden family of Peddimore the right to fish in the “Ebroch” where it ran past their land. It used to power New Hall Mill and today runs partly in a channel through New Hall Valley Country Park, with the Plantsbrook Local Nature Reserve along its course.

The Victorian village

The church and the parish

Walmley became one of the ecclesiastical districts carved out of the huge parish of Sutton Coldfield. St John the Evangelist was built in 1845 to a design by D. R. Hill, in a Norman style, in Staffordshire blue brick with red sandstone dressings. The parish was formed in 1846. Nikolaus Pevsner was not a fan of the blue brick, but the church has become a landmark on Walmley Road, and a community extension was added beside it in the 1990s.

The school beyond the wood

The first school in Walmley was a charity school founded in 1792, paid for with money the courts had impounded over alleged mismanagement by the Sutton Corporation. It stood on a patch of land locals called “Beyond the Wood”, near Jones Wood on Fox Hollies Road, with a house for the headmistress. In 1851 the school moved to a larger building next to the church, and the old buildings became two cottages.

The almshouses

At the junction of Walmley Road and Fox Hollies Road are almshouses built in stages, the first two cottages in 1828 and the second two in 1863, both listed grade II, with later additions in the twentieth century. They are known as Lingard House, a name that recalls their benefactor, Miss Lingard, a local woman. The front buildings are used as offices by Sutton Coldfield Municipal Charities. A war memorial unveiled in 1920 used to stand in front of them and has since been moved beside the Fox Inn.

Penns station and Walmley House

The Midland Railway opened Penns station in 1879. Although it was in Walmley, it was named after Penns, and it closed to passengers in 1964. The line is still used for freight. Walmley House was built in the 1860s by the Horsfall family as part of the Penns Hall estate, and it was a well-known landmark until it was pulled down in 1969 for new houses.

How Walmley grew

Ribbon development between the wars

In 1905 the roads in Walmley were described as dusty country tracks. Between the wars, schools started to open and houses went up in lines along Walmley Road and Penns Lane. The Fox Inn was rebuilt in the 1930s, and the Shrubbery School, founded in 1930, is now on the council’s local list. During the Second World War there was an Italian prisoner of war camp near Jones Wood, on land later used for the schools on Walmley Ash Road.

The boom suburb

After the war Walmley changed completely. Much of the farmland, especially to the south, was built over with estates of semis and detached houses. The New Hall estate came first, and the New Hall Manor estate, sometimes called The Grange, about thirty years later. By the end of the twentieth century Walmley was a large, fairly affluent suburb, but it kept its own identity, helped by residents who in the 1960s successfully opposed plans to widen Walmley Road through the village.

Walmley Village today

The shops in the centre, known as Walmley Village, were improved in 2004 under the council’s local action plan, with new paving, parking and a 20mph limit. Walmley has around sixteen listed buildings and a handful of locally listed ones, but they are spread so widely that a conservation area was judged not to be practical.

Langley and Peddimore

To the north-east, between Walmley and the A38, Birmingham’s development plan sets aside large areas around Langley for new housing and around Peddimore for employment. That means a lot of brand new homes will be built close to Walmley over the coming years, and new-build snagging is likely to become a bigger part of plastering work locally.

A walk through Walmley

Walmley Road

Walmley Road was for a long time the main route from Sutton Coldfield town centre south towards Birmingham, and the village grew along it. Walking it from the north, you pass the rugby club ground near Thimble End, then the almshouses at the Fox Hollies Road junction, the church of St John, the shops of Walmley Village and the Fox Inn. Houses on this stretch range from Victorian cottages to interwar semis and post-war infill, so on a single road you can meet lime on lath, early gypsum and modern board within a few doors of each other.

Fox Hollies Road and Jones Wood

Fox Hollies Road runs north-east from the village past Jones Wood, a small protected woodland, and the site of the old charity school. This is roughly where the Domesday hamlet of Langley is thought to have been. The road is lined with schools and nurseries, and the houses around it are mostly from the middle and later twentieth century.

Walmley Ash Road and Eachelhurst Road

To the south, Walmley Ash Road takes you towards Minworth through the area that used to be called Walmley Ash, with the infant and junior schools built on the old prisoner of war camp site. Eachelhurst Road runs on towards Pype Hayes. There used to be a busy railway goods yard on Eachelhurst Road; it is now a housing estate, one of many places in Walmley where the street names and house types only make sense once you know what used to be there.

Penns Lane and Wylde Green Road

Penns Lane leads west from the village towards the old Penns Hall estate and the site of the station, with ribbon development of the 1920s and 30s along much of its length. Wylde Green Road crosses the New Hall Valley, with the country park on one side, Wincelle overlooking it, and the ford keeper’s cottage by Plants Brook. The valley gives this side of Walmley a green edge that many people do not expect so close to the city.

What is behind the plaster: a guide by age

The old halls and farmhouses

The oldest buildings around Walmley, the sandstone cottages, timber-framed barns and early brick farmhouses, have solid walls, sometimes of mixed stone and brick, with lime plaster and lime-based renders. Warrenhouse Farm’s roughcast is a reminder that even old brick buildings here were often rendered. These buildings need breathable materials throughout. Gypsum and cement plaster trap moisture in stone and soft brick, and on a listed building the council will usually expect lime.

Victorian and early twentieth-century cottages

The few nineteenth-century cottages and villas along Walmley Road, around the church and near the almshouses have solid brick walls and lime plaster, with lath ceilings. The common problems are old patch repairs in different materials, blown plaster near the floor where damp has come in, and cracked ceilings where the laths have moved.

The 1920s and 1930s

The ribbon-development houses along Walmley Road and Penns Lane are mostly semis and detached houses with cavity walls, although some of the earliest may have solid walls. Inside, the original plaster was often lime and gypsum, and ceilings were lath or early boards. Picture rails, plain coving and simple ceiling roses are common. These houses often need ceiling repairs, a skim over walls that have been papered and stripped many times, and making good where alterations have been made.

The post-war estates

Most of Walmley’s houses were built between the 1950s and the 1980s. They have cavity walls in brick or brick and block, sand and cement or gypsum backing plaster, and plasterboard ceilings. In many of the 1960s and 70s houses the ceilings have a textured coating. The structure of these houses is usually straightforward, so the work is mostly about the finish.

The New Hall Manor estate and later

Houses from the 1980s onward increasingly use plasterboard on the walls as well, either stuck to the blockwork with dabs or fixed to timber studs. These are quick to build and generally sound, but the finish can suffer from cracked joints, popping screws and hollow areas behind the boards.

Brand new homes

New houses on the developments to the north-east will be almost entirely plasterboard, with tape and joint or a thin skim finish. They need time to dry out and settle in their first year or two, and some cracking is normal.

Working on red sandstone and early brick

Why stone walls need special care

The sandstone cottages and halls around Walmley are built from a soft, porous local stone that holds a lot of water. Inside, such walls were plastered with lime, which lets that water evaporate into the room. Where the stone has been covered with a cement-based plaster, moisture tends to collect behind it, and salts crystallise at the surface. The tell-tale signs are crumbling, powdery plaster low down and paint that keeps lifting.

How we approach it

On stone and early brick, our starting point is to remove any hard, sealing plaster that is causing harm, let the wall dry as far as the season allows, and re-plaster in lime. The work is slower, there are more coats, and every layer has to stiffen before it can take another. We also make sure the paint system on top is breathable, because a plastic emulsion on a lime wall cancels much of the benefit. For listed buildings, we agree the approach with the conservation officer before starting.

Mixed walls

Many old buildings in the area have walls that combine stone, brick and later repairs, sometimes in the same room. The junctions between them are where cracks appear, because the materials move differently. Reinforcing those joints with mesh embedded in the base coat helps keep them closed.

Common jobs in Walmley houses

Plastering tired walls

The most frequent job is a skim on walls that have lost their smooth finish. After decades of wallpaper going up and coming down, many post-war houses have walls that are sound but scarred, with torn paper facing, patches of filler and old screw holes. A new finish coat over the lot turns that into a wall you can paint straight onto after the mist coat.

Textured ceilings

Many houses in Walmley still have textured ceilings. If the coating is sound and well stuck, it can be prepared and skimmed. If it is cracked or the ceiling is uneven, over-boarding and skimming is usually better. Anything textured that dates from before about 2000 might have asbestos in it, so a lab check on a chip of it comes first, ahead of any sanding, scraping or drilling. We cover this in more detail in our guide to plastering over Artex.

Cracked ceilings

Ceiling cracks are very common in houses of every age in Walmley. In older houses they often follow the lath lines, and in newer ones the board joints. Hairline cracks can usually be filled and the ceiling skimmed. Larger cracks, sagging or a ceiling that moves when pressed need more work and sometimes replacement.

Blown plaster

“Blown” means the plaster has lost its bond with the brick or block behind. Knock on it and it rings dull, and you may see a bulge or a crazed patch. A few small spots get cut back to a firm edge and filled. Where the failure is widespread, the whole wall goes back to masonry and is plastered again from scratch.

After other trades

Rewiring, new heating, a moved boiler or a new kitchen all leave damage behind. Chased walls, holes and broken corners can be patched to disappear under paint, and where there is a lot of damage, a skim over the whole wall is usually tidier than many small patches.

Buying a house in Walmley

On the post-war estates

If you are buying a 1950s, 60s or 70s house, look closely at the ceilings. Textured finishes, uneven joints and cracks across the room are common and are not usually serious, but they will affect how much decorating you need to do. Check the bathroom and the bedrooms on outside walls for mould, which suggests condensation. In the kitchen, look behind units if you can, since old tiles and patched walls are often hidden there.

In older houses

For older properties on Walmley Road, around the church or out towards the farms, the survey will probably mention damp readings and cracks. Meters often give high readings on solid walls even when there is no active problem, so do not panic, but do find out what the walls are made of and what plaster is on them. Photos of the relevant rooms and the survey wording are usually enough for us to give you an idea of what work might be needed.

Doing the plastering first

If you are moving into a house that needs work, the easiest order is: electrics and plumbing, then plastering, then decorating, then carpets and furniture. Empty rooms are much quicker to protect and plaster, and you avoid damaging new carpets or furniture.

Snagging a new home

What is normal

A brand new house is drying out for its first year or two. Timber shrinks, plaster and concrete give off moisture, and the building settles. Hairline cracks at the corners of rooms, along ceiling joints and around door frames are common in that period and are usually not a sign of a structural fault.

What to report

Larger cracks, boards that move when pressed, nail or screw heads pushing through, and patches where the finish was clearly never smooth are worth listing for the builder during the snagging period. Many developers will fix these at a set point, often after the first year. If you would rather have the work done to a better standard than the original finish, or the builder’s period has ended, we can repair individual faults or re-skim whole rooms.

Before you decorate

Painting a new-build with full-strength emulsion straight away often leads to peeling and shows every flaw in the finish. A mist coat, a careful look at the walls in strong side light, and some time for the house to settle usually lead to a much better result.

Extensions and bigger projects

Rear and side extensions

Walmley’s post-war houses often sit on good-sized plots, and single and two-storey extensions are very common. Once the structure is up, we board ceilings, plaster block walls, and make sure the joins between old and new are reinforced so they do not crack later.

Kitchen and dining room knock-throughs

Opening up the back of a 1960s semi to make a large kitchen and family room means taking out a wall, fitting a steel and making good the old wall faces. The new opening, the patched floor-to-ceiling strips where walls were removed, and the old walls all need to finish level and smooth, so the room looks as though it has always been that way.

Loft conversions

Loft conversions are popular on the semis and detached houses. They need insulated plasterboard on the slopes and walls, careful jointing around dormers and roof windows, and attention to the stairwell where the new staircase arrives. Building control usually inspects the insulation before boarding, so the timing has to fit around your builder.

Garage conversions

Garages turned into playrooms, offices or bedrooms usually have a single-skin wall at the front and sometimes at the side. These need insulating and lining before they are plastered, and the infill where the garage door was needs to be detailed properly so the plaster does not crack along the line.

Plants Brook, clay and damp

Low ground near the brook

Parts of Walmley are low-lying, especially near Plants Brook and the New Hall Valley. Houses on lower ground can be more exposed to high groundwater and to damp in the lower walls, particularly if ground levels outside have been raised by paths or patios.

Clay and cracking

Much of the area is on clay, which shrinks in dry summers and swells in wet winters. Gardens with large trees close to the house, and there are plenty in Walmley, make this movement worse. Thin cracks that widen in August and tighten again by February, typically fanning out from window heads and door frames, are mostly cosmetic. Anything that keeps getting wider year on year, or that you can see on the outside face of the brick too, needs an engineer’s opinion before it is plastered over.

Finding the source

Damp in a Walmley house is far more often caused by something simple than by failed damp-proofing: a leaking gutter, a downpipe soaking a wall, bridging of the damp course by soil or a patio, or condensation in a cold room. We look for the cause before talking about plaster, because new plaster on a wall that is still getting wet will fail.

Condensation in post-war houses

Many 1960s and 70s houses suffer from condensation, especially in bedrooms and bathrooms, because they were built with less insulation and ventilation than modern homes. Black mould on outside walls and around windows is the usual sign. Better ventilation and heating are the first steps, and lining the coldest walls with insulated plasterboard can help.

Rendering in Walmley

Older roughcast and pebbledash

Some of the interwar and post-war houses in Walmley have roughcast or pebbledash, often on the upper storey or the gables. Repairs need to match the aggregate and texture of the original. On the oldest buildings, such as the farmhouses, lime render is usually the right choice.

Modern renders

For a post-war or newer house, or an extension that needs to match, the usual choices are a sand and cement render painted afterwards, a thin-coat silicone, or K-Rend monocouche and silicone systems. The monocouche is pigmented right through, so there is no painting to keep up with, and silicone finishes shed rain and stay cleaner under trees. We explain the system fully on its own page, and our render comparison article helps with the choice.

Checking before winter

Render with cracks, bulges or hollow patches lets water in, and frost makes the damage worse. Before the first frosts, go round the house with this render warning-signs list. For more on rendering in the area, see rendering in Walsall and rendering in Birmingham.

Permission and the council

Birmingham City Council

Walmley is part of Sutton Coldfield, which has been within the City of Birmingham since 1974, so planning and listed building questions go to Birmingham City Council. Sutton Coldfield also has a town council for local matters.

Listed and locally listed buildings

The listed buildings in and around Walmley, such as the almshouses, the old halls and farmhouses and the ford keeper’s cottage, need listed building consent for many changes, sometimes including work inside. Locally listed buildings, like the Shrubbery School, do not have the same legal protection but the council takes their character into account in planning decisions.

No conservation area

Because Walmley does not have a conservation area, most houses here have the normal permitted development rights. No consent is needed for plastering indoors. A change of render finish on the outside usually counts as permitted development so long as the result resembles the houses around it, but some estates have conditions that remove these rights, so check if in doubt.

Room by room

Kitchens

The ideal slot for kitchen plastering is when the new cables and pipes are in the walls but the cabinets are still in their boxes. The fitter then has a flat wall to work to, and nobody has to fill round the end panels later.

Bathrooms

Behind shower tiles we fit cement-based or moisture-resistant board rather than a gypsum skim. Elsewhere a standard skim is fine in a bathroom with a fan that actually works.

Hall, stairs and landing

The staircase wall is the hardest to reach, so we set up safe access to let us skim each wall in one go. Where the house is older, the strip of plaster beside the stair string has usually taken a beating, and we fix that while the access is up.

Living rooms and bedrooms

These rooms are usually straightforward. In older houses we check for original features worth keeping, and in post-war houses we often find cracked ceilings that benefit from a full skim.

How a job works

1. Photos first. WhatsApp me on 07453 614095 or message the page with pictures and rough room sizes. There is also a form on the contact page.
2. For older houses, or where a picture does not tell the whole story, someone comes out to look.
3. Together we fix the start date, what goes on the walls and which rooms come first.
4. Day one starts with protection: floors, the staircase, doors and whatever furniture is left are all covered.
5. Then the preparation, and then the plaster.
6. At the end we clean down and explain how to treat the rooms while they dry.

Our hours are Monday to Friday 7am to 5pm and Saturday 7am to 1pm, and we are closed on Sundays.

Getting the house ready

• Empty the rooms as far as you can.
• Anything screwed or hung on the walls, from mirrors to curtain tracks, is best taken down beforehand.
• Get the faceplates of sockets and switches eased off by an electrician.
• Tell us about parking. Walmley Road can be busy, and some estate roads are narrow.
• Keep pets away from the rooms being plastered.

After the plastering

Paint has to wait until the plaster has dried through, which you can see when the dark patches have all gone pale. Warmth and fresh air help; a heater pointed at the wall does not. Gypsum takes a diluted emulsion as its first coat, while lime wants a breathable mineral paint. There is a fuller explanation in our drying times article.

Near Walmley

We cover Walmley, Walmley Ash, Minworth, Wylde Green, Falcon Lodge, Reddicap Heath and the New Hall area. Nearby, see plastering in Sutton Coldfield, plastering in Erdington, plastering in Mere Green, plastering in Castle Bromwich and plastering in Coleshill. Every other town is listed under areas we cover, and the whole range of work under plastering and rendering services.

Talk to RCR Connections Ltd

The team has 62 years of combined experience. A 1930s house on Penns Lane, a 1970s semi near the schools or a brand new home on the Langley side: whichever it is, start with a few photos. WhatsApp me on 07453 614095 or message the page.

Walmley homes we plaster

Walmley is mostly 1930s to 1990s family homes, with new houses going up on the Langley side. Here’s where we work most, the homes you’ll find there and the plastering jobs that come up.

• Walmley village and Walmley Road. 1930s homes and shops. Through lounges and bay windows.
• Penns Lane. 1930s and post-war houses. Artex ceilings covered and kitchen extensions.
• New Hall. 1960s and 1970s homes. Garage conversions and textured ceilings.
• Minworth. Older homes and newer estates. Rooms replastered after a rewire.
• Langley. New homes still going up. Board joint cracks and loft rooms.
• Wishaw. Village homes. Ceilings and extensions.
• Walmley Ash. Family homes. Cracked plasterboard and loft rooms.

Whatever the house, RCR Connections Ltd puts 62 years of combined experience into it. We’re Birmingham based, covering the whole of the Midlands, and we work Monday to Friday 7am to 5pm and Saturday 7am to 1pm. WhatsApp me on 07453 614095 or message the page with photos of the room and your road or postcode in Walmley.

Outside, we also fit K-Rend monocouche and silicone render for homes around Walmley, see rendering in Sutton Coldfield. Down the road, we’re also the plasterer in Erdington.

More services: Plastering repairs · Plastering and coving · Plastering extensions and lofts.

More from RCR Connections Ltd: All plastering and rendering services · Areas we cover