A Study into Building Surveying Practice with Regards to the Evaluation of Marine Degradation in Building Fabric

Thomas, Evan

Abstract

The World is surrounded by approximately 193,000 miles of coastline (Small & Nicholls, 2003). The United Kingdom is an island located off the northwestern coast of mainland Europe. The United Kingdom comprises the whole of the island of Great Britain (Hastings, Josephson, Morrill, Frere, Ravenhill, Gilbert, 2020). There are 29 million homes in the United Kingdom, including England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Committee on Climate Change, 2019) with a vast amount of housing stock on the United Kingdom facing the sea and further inland. This research explores building surveying practice with regards to the evaluation of marine degradation in building fabric. The research is based on, and studies, the effects of the marine environment on the built environment of Llandudno, which has been selected as the method test area due to locality and the subject interest of the building surveying practitioner researcher. In achieving this, the research makes a contribution to knowledge by using a mixed method approach to compare and contrast methods for marine degradation on a building façade, developing a framework for the identification and assessment of differing methods of marine degradation assessment. The methods could be adopted by building surveying practice when carrying out a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors survey on a building by the coastline of United Kingdom, Europe, or the World, and following this, to make recommendations and validate with practitioners in a focus group. The information produced during both exercises is scrutinised, and synthesised with existing literature. The results point to a new proposed method that detects salts on a building, salts being known as a chemical property in marine aerosols, with research discovering salts being known to cause a disruptive effect on a building’s façade, therefore, causing marine degradation. The new method was considered to not have the ability to detect marine degradation, however the new method detected salts that are linked to marine degradation. The results, from the experienced Chartered Building Surveyors focus group validation of the methods, highlighted little knowledge was known of marine degradation, further, during the focus group the research uncovered the RICS Isurv report template had no sections within the report template to report on marine degradation. The research concludes by summarising the findings and making proposals, which will help to support the development of Building Surveying Practice and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors Isurv reporting template, whilst assessing a building’s façade for marine degradation. Further, future climate change act 2008 and climate change strategy 2021 – 2024 policy updates could benefit from this research.
Keywords: Building surveying, marine degradation, methods, professional practice, defects

• Thesis Type: Thesis by Publication
• Online Publication Date: Jun 19, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jun 11, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 20, 2025
• Award Date: Jun 19, 2025