Some thoughts about thatching in the modern world
Mark Powell, October 2026
I was born and brought up in a thatched cottage and for twenty five years the major part of my income came from supplying thatchers with their hazel spars. I still live under a thatched roof and have extended its life by patching and re-ridging it myself. I have also worked as a labourer for several thatchers so I think I can claim a fairly deep familiarity with the craft. Do I love thatch as a roofing material? I’m afraid the answer is complicated and not entirely positive.
There is no doubt that thatch is picturesque and forms part of our cultural and architectural heritage. Thatched cottages tend to be cool in summer but not necessarily warm in winter. Thatch has a limited lifespan and maintenance and re-thatching is costly. Thatched properties are expensive to insure, not least because of the extra fire risk. Before the Second World War most thatching was done by a local thatcher using local materials and, at a time when function was generally more important than appearance, the life of a roof would have been extended by ongoing repairs. Nowadays straw is often transported large distances rather than being grown in nearby fields, and a large proportion of the water reed used is imported, from as far afield as China. Many thatchers use hazel spars made in Poland and everything from screw fixings to wire netting will presumably come mainly from China. Bearing all this in mind I think it would be difficult to claim that thatch is a ‘green’ form of roofing in the modern world.
While modern thatched roofs add to the charm of the rural street scene, most roofs will look rather different than they did a century ago. In my home region (North Bedfordshire) the vast majority of roofs would have been thatched with local threshed straw in the long straw technique. This had a certain rustic charm with stickwork above the eaves and sometimes described as looking as if ‘poured’ on the roof, with some of the length of the straw showing and often with some of the ears of the wheat adding to the texture of the surface. Nowadays, long straw is much less common, many roofs having been re-thatched in combed wheat reed or water reed in the past fifty years, despite a presumption that listed buildings should not be converted without permission. Combed wheat reed and water reed roofs have a similar appearance to each other with just the butt ends of the material apparent at the surface. A much more obvious difference in the appearance of thatched roofs compared with a century ago results from the relatively recent trend towards block-cut ridges with their patterns of scallops and inverted triangles. If you look at old pre-war photographs of thatched cottages, almost all thatched roofs had flush ridges and often just three lines of horizontal liggers to hold the ridge material down, not even any crossed sticks. The block skirts into which the patterns are cut are present mainly to provide a layer for that decorative purpose. A block-cut ridge is not necessarily any more durable than a flush ridge despite the impression that extra thickness has been applied. A well-thatched flush ridge may be considerably longer lasting that a poorly thatched block-cut ridge. Although mainly a post-war fashion, patterned ridges are now the norm and most customers assume that a patterned ridge will be replaced with something similar. Creating a patterned ridge takes considerably more material and significantly more time than a simple flush ridge and this is just one of the factors that makes thatch so expensive these days.
It is only in recent decades that it has become usual for thatchers to work off scaffolding; traditionally most thatching was done from ladders footed at ground level. Extending the life of thatched roofs was almost certainly more commonly performed in the past, sometimes by the cottager themselves or a little job for the local thatcher. Nowadays repairs are still made, usually some patching to the main coat when a roof requires a new ridge, but ongoing repairs of old roofs are rendered largely uneconomic with modern labour costs and the presumption that scaffolding will be required for all but the smallest of easily accessed repairs.
In recent decades various measures have been introduced in an attempt to mitigate the problem of flammability of thatch, mainly by applying some sort of fire retardant barrier onto the rafters (immediately below the thatch) when roofs have to be stripped down to the roof timbers. Earlier barriers contained asbestos and these have created an expensive complication when those roofs require re-thatching. Not only does the asbestos barrier require specialist handling and disposal but the thatch itself may be deemed contaminated resulting in a large bulk of potentially hazardous waste. More modern types of fire retardant barriers include thick aluminium foil and fire resistant membrane supplied in rolls. These membranes don’t, of course, prevent thatch fires but they do have some effect in delaying the spread of any fire from thatch to the interior. There may be a downside to such membranes in that they may prevent a gentle airflow from under the rafters which might otherwise keep thatch better aired. With or without a fire retardant barrier, the owners of thatched cottages find that their properties are expensive to insure and many owners live with an enhanced fear of fire and often worry when a bonfire is lit in the vicinity or when fireworks are let off.
Many thatchers are concerned about the availability and quality of thatching materials. There has been a run of poor harvests (2023 to 2025) in terms of home-grown straw leading to a shortage which has added to existing difficulties of producing enough straw suitable for thatching. The problem is especially acute for long straw, much of which is still cut with a binder, stooked in the field and threshed in a traditional threshing drum, all very labour intensive. Even after threshing the straw requires an additional time consuming process where the straw is forked and dampened to form a pile called a bed and pulled by hand into yealms. Traditionally there would have been casual workers available to perform these seasonal and time consuming jobs but it is difficult to find people with the time, inclination and skills these days. Sourcing water reed is less of a problem than obtaining suitable straw because a lot of reed is now imported, including from Baltic countries, Eastern Europe and China. The big worry with water reed these days is the increasing problem of ‘white rot’. This is caused by a fungus but little seems to be known about why it is becoming a more common and severe issue; even the identity of the fungus appears to be uncertain or unknown. A water reed roof was traditionally considered to have an effective life of fifty years or more but now it is not uncommon to find roofs thatched twenty five to thirty years ago which are so badly degraded by white rot that they require complete re-thatching. My own hunch is that the increasing effects of nitrogen compounds has rendered thatch more susceptible to rotting. It is well known that nitrogenous substances can promote degradation of carbon-rich organic materials and hence fertiliser or manure is sometimes added to compost heaps to speed up the process. Reed beds may be increasingly affected by fertiliser and sewage incursions from higher in their catchment areas, perhaps rendering the reed stems less durable. Thatched roofs may also be more prone to rotting due to the general eutrophication of the modern landscape. Whether white rot is really caused by increased nitrogen compounds or whether there are other factors at play appears to be unknown.
Although I value thatched properties for their rustic charm, it is a shame that most now have such a different appearance from their local traditions and many have been converted to a different thatching material. The dominant traditional thatch of North Bedfordshire would have been long straw but the majority have been changed to combed wheat reed or water reed. With straw roofs it was usual to retain a base coat and apply new thatch layers by fixing into this base coat. The historic base coat is usually Victorian or older and I consider these to be part of the heritage of a thatched cottage. Unfortunately many roofs were stripped back to the rafters in recent decades resulting in the complete loss of this historic feature.
I must admit that I look with a degree of envy at those formerly thatched cottages which were stripped of their thatch during the mid twentieth century and replaced with fibre-cement tiles. Such roofs often weather to a similar grey colour as old thatch and retain much of their cottage character.