Two very different kinds of house
Newark's housing has two distinct faces. One is the old market town that grew up around the castle and St Mary Magdalene, with a conservation area first designated in 1968, the second ever designated in England. A 2022 council review proposed extending it to take in the late-Victorian and Edwardian planned housing around the Magnus School, on Hatton Gardens, Winchilsea Avenue and Milner Street, the 19th-century houses on Crown Street and the late-Victorian and early 20th-century houses on Lime Grove. The other face is the new estates: Fernwood, the Middlebeck development on the southern edge, where a school opened in September 2021, and housing on the former Balderton Hospital site.
Older ceilings, older details
Houses on streets like Winchilsea Avenue and Crown Street were built when ceilings were lath and plaster. When those ceilings crack along their length or bow in the middle, the plaster has usually lost its grip, and boarding is the lasting fix. We screw new board through to the joists where the old ceiling is sound enough to stay as a backing, or strip it out where it is not. Newark's conservation area is on the national Heritage at Risk Register, partly because of lost architectural detail, so where a ceiling has a cornice, rose or picture rail, we talk about keeping it before any board goes up. Losing those details is easy; getting them back is not.
New-build changes
On Fernwood and Middlebeck, every ceiling and many internal walls are already plasterboard. The work there is about making the house fit how you live: boarding out a garage, splitting a large bedroom with a stud partition, lining a loft room or adding acoustic board to a home office wall. If you are boarding an integral garage with a bedroom above, the ceiling needs fire-rated board to keep the separation between the two. In a house that is only a year or two old, hairline cracks along joints and small nail pops are common as the timber dries. They are cosmetic and can be cut back, taped and skimmed when the movement has eased.
Booking
Newark-on-Trent is about 15 miles north-east of our base in Mapperley, at the far edge of our area but still within the 30 miles we cover. Tell us roughly where you are, from Balderton to the streets round the Market Place, and what the room is used for. Call 07877 353120 or send photos through the enquiry form. We work seven days a week, 7am to 5pm.
