Curly Blonde Girl In A Straw Thatched House

• Disadvantages
Thatched houses are harder to insure because of the perceived fire risk, and because thatching is labour intensive it is much more expensive to thatch a roof than to cover it with slate or tiles. Birds can damage a roof while they are foraging for grubs, and rodents are attracted by residual grain in straw.
Thatch has fallen out of favour in much of the industrialised world not because of fire, but because thatching has become very expensive and alternative 'hard' materials are cheaper — but this situation is slowly changing. There are almost 100,000 thatched roofs in the UK, and many more are being built every year.
New thatched roofs were forbidden in London by the Normans in the 12th century, and existing roofs had to have their surfaces plastered to reduce the risk of fire. The Great Fire of London in 1666 had nothing to do with thatch. The modern Globe Theatre is one of the few thatched buildings in London (others can be found in the suburb of Kingsbury), but the Globe's modern, water reed thatch is purely for decorative purpose and actually lies over a fully waterproofed roof built with modern materials. The Globe Theatre, opened in 1997, was modeled on the Rose which was destroyed by a fire on a dry June night in 1613 when a burning wad of cloth ejected from a special effects canon during a performance set light to the surface of the thatch.