A drone survey firm covering Plymouth

Plymouth is a little under an hour from the Exeter base, effectively all of it on the A38. That makes it a planned visit rather than a call-out, and for a city that size the sensible pattern is more than one building in a day: a managing agent, a housing provider or a facilities team with several properties gets far more out of a single booked visit than a series of separate trips.

Travel is inside the fixed price here as everywhere else. What the distance changes is the notice needed, not the cost, and being straight about that is more useful to a buyer comparing quotes than a claim of city-wide same-day cover from sixty miles away.

The rebuilt post-war centre is largely flat-roofed commercial blocks, with asphalt and single-ply coverings that fail quietly and are almost never inspected properly because access means a permit and a walk on a membrane. Those are the buildings where a survey from the air produces the biggest difference between what an owner assumed and what is actually there.

Around it there are surviving Victorian terraces at the Hoe, Stoke and Mutley, extensive post-war estates, modern waterfront apartments at Royal William Yard and Millbay, and lead and zinc on the civic buildings. The city is built over a series of limestone ridges, so streets climb and fall sharply between the waterfront and the higher suburbs, which means a building's exposure can differ enormously from one a few streets away.

Plymouth is the most airspace-sensitive place on this list. There is a naval dockyard, a working port, hospital helicopter activity and a dense urban centre, and none of that is something to discover on the morning of a visit. Every address here has its airspace and its surroundings checked before a date is confirmed, and where permission or coordination is needed it is sought properly rather than worked around.

The same applies at ground level. A city centre building fronting a busy pavement, or a waterfront block with public access on three sides, needs a plan for how the area is managed during the flight window, because the certificate held sets how close the aircraft may operate to people and property outside your control. Where a site cannot be managed to make that work, the job is turned down rather than stretched, and that gets said at quote stage rather than after a wasted trip.

Salt-laden wind off the Sound reaches well inland across the city and the exposed high suburbs at Crownhill and Southway catch the weather badly, so exposure here is a genuine variable rather than a background condition.

Sutton Harbour and the Barbican are the oldest part of the city and the tightest to work in: narrow lanes, slate-hung and rendered frontages, a working harbour on one side and a great many people on it in season.

The Hoe gives open ground nearby, which helps, but a survey of a Barbican building is planned around the harbour and the crowds rather than treated as an ordinary street. Royal William Yard on the other side of the water is the same problem in a different form: large historic structures with public access all around them.