Roof Lantern Installation
Flat-roof glazing sized to the room and detailed into the kerb below it.
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Braintree district
Rooflight installation in Coggeshall
Wool town, exceptional listed density. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
We travel to Coggeshall
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CoggeshallTown covered
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In Coggeshall
What we install on Coggeshall roofs
Flat Roof Rooflight Installation
Flush and kerb-mounted units into single-ply, felt and GRP flat roofs.
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Roof windows trimmed into slate, clay and concrete tile without proud flashing.
View this service →VELUX Window Installation
We install VELUX alongside Fakro, Keylite and Roto roof windows.
View this service →Electric and Opening Rooflights
Actuated opening units, rain sensors and controls, wired and commissioned.
View this service →Energy Efficient Rooflights
Specified on U-value and g-value, not on the brochure photograph.
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The local detail
15 things worth knowing about Coggeshall roofs
Coggeshall has one of the densest concentrations of listed buildings of any small town in England, several hundred of them inside a few streets. Paycocke’s on West Street, the Grange Barn out towards the abbey, and behind them street after street of timber framed houses built on wool and cloth money between the fourteen hundreds and the sixteen hundreds. Working on a roof here starts with a question nobody asks in a modern town: what does this building’s listing actually protect, and where will the daylight be allowed to go. This page answers that, and covers what is genuinely on Coggeshall roofs once you get above the render.
- 01 A town where the listing comes before the survey
- 02 Paycocke’s, close studding and the long wall jetty
- 03 Smoke blackened rafters, and what they tell you
- 04 Thatch converted to tile, and the pitch it left behind
- 05 Aisled barns, and daylight into a converted one
- 06 Where the glass is allowed to go on a protected roof
- 07 The unit that gets past a Coggeshall application
- 08 Clay tile at a handmade gauge, and re-laying around an opening
- 09 Tie beams, low ceilings and where light can reach
- 10 The nineteenth century houses towards Colchester Road
- 11 Post-war housing at Highfields and Tilkey
- 12 Flat roofed additions behind the listed frontages
- 13 Working on Stoneham Street and West Street
- 14 Consent, notification and the order they happen in
- 15 Starting a Coggeshall enquiry
A town where the listing comes before the survey
In most Essex towns the survey happens and the paperwork follows. In Coggeshall the order reverses. A high proportion of the housing stock is listed, the rest of the historic core sits inside the conservation area, and forming an opening in a roof is an alteration to the fabric of a protected building.
Listed building consent is granted by Braintree District Council and it is separate from planning permission. It considers the interior as well as the exterior, and on a medieval building the roof structure itself is often among the most significant surviving elements. That does not close the door. It means the position is chosen with the officer’s eye in mind from the first conversation, and the unit is agreed before it is ordered.
In Coggeshall the roof timbers are frequently the oldest surviving part of the building, and they are protected accordingly.
Paycocke’s, close studding and the long wall jetty
Thomas Paycocke’s house is the town’s showpiece and it explains a lot about the rest of the street. Close studded timber framing with the studs almost touching, an elaborately carved bressumer, and a first floor jettied out over the ground floor along the whole length of the elevation rather than at one end.
A long wall jetty changes the geometry above it. The upper floor is wider than the lower, so the wall plate and therefore the eaves sit further out than the ground floor wall line, and the roof plane above starts further forward than the plan suggests. On a narrow street that puts more of the slope in public view than a homeowner expects, which is precisely the calculation a conservation officer will be making.
Smoke blackened rafters, and what they tell you
Pull back the insulation in a Coggeshall roof space and the rafters are quite often black on the underside. That is soot from an open hearth in a hall with no chimney, deposited before the building was floored over and a stack inserted, usually in the fifteen hundreds.
Smoke blackening is direct physical evidence of the building’s earliest phase, and it is one of the things listing exists to protect. It also tells you the timber is original, which settles any argument about the age of the roof. Where blackened rafters are found, an opening is placed in a later range or a rebuilt slope wherever there is a choice, and where there is genuinely no choice the design works between existing members rather than through them.
Thatch converted to tile, and the pitch it left behind
A striking number of Coggeshall roofs run at fifty degrees or steeper, which is far above the Essex average. The reason is that they were built for thatch and later stripped and hung with clay tile, keeping the original pitch because nobody rebuilds a roof frame to lower it.
A steep pitch is a gift for weathering. Water leaves the surface almost immediately, the flashing sits in a self draining position and standing water is not a concern. It costs you head height at the eaves and it means a roof window sits at an angle where you look through it rather than up at it, so the position needs to be high on the slope to see sky rather than the roof of the house opposite. Some roof windows are also rated only to a maximum pitch, and that limit gets checked on this stock rather than assumed.
Aisled barns, and daylight into a converted one
Grange Barn is one of the oldest timber framed barns in Europe and it is the head of a family of agricultural buildings scattered around the parish, several of which are now houses. The structure is aisled: a central nave carried on posts with lower aisles either side, and a roof of considerable span.
Converting one produces the opposite daylight problem from a cottage. The volume is large, the eaves are low, the ridge is high and the middle of the plan is a long way from any wall. Rooflights are almost always the answer and they are almost always designed rather than trimmed, because the frame is doing structural work and the openings have to respect the bay rhythm. A run of units along one bay line reads as agricultural. One large opening in the middle of a slope does not.
Where the glass is allowed to go on a protected roof
The pattern of approvals in a town like this is consistent enough to plan around, and it is worth understanding before a position is chosen.
Rear slopes with no view from a public place are the easiest. Later additions, outshuts and twentieth century rebuilds are next, because the fabric being altered has no historic value. Roofs already re-covered in modern tile are more straightforward than untouched historic coverings. Front planes facing Stoneham Street, West Street or Church Street are the hardest, and where an opening on one is genuinely necessary it wants the smallest unit that does the job, set flush, in a slim dark frame.
The unit that gets past a Coggeshall application
The physical difference between a unit that reads as historic and one that does not comes down to three things: how far it stands above the plane of the covering, how wide the frame looks from the ground, and whether there is a bar down the middle.
A cast conservation unit sits flush, carries a slim black frame and has a central vertical glazing bar, so from the street it reads as a nineteenth century roof light rather than a modern window. Modern glazing goes inside it, so the thermal performance is current even though the appearance is not. The conservation rooflight page covers the profiles in detail. Sizing is the other half of it: two small units in line will often be approved where one larger one is refused.
Clay tile at a handmade gauge, and re-laying around an opening
The covering across the historic core is handmade clay plain tile and peg tile, hung on battens over a roof that has moved and settled for four or five centuries. The gauge varies, the plane undulates, and the colour range across one roof is wider than any modern batch.
Opening one up is slow. Tiles come off carefully and get stacked for re-laying, a proportion of them break in handling whatever care is taken, and matching stock has to be sourced before the roof is opened. The weathering around the unit is lead soakers and an apron dressed course by course to the gauge on that particular roof, not a kit lifted out of a box. It is the part of the job that takes the time and it is the part that decides how the finished roof looks from the garden.
Tie beams, low ceilings and where light can reach
Inside a Coggeshall house the ceilings are low and crossed by tie beams and joists, so light arriving from above meets an obstacle course before it reaches the floor. A rooflight in the slope of an upper room throws light onto the underside of beams and into the bays between them rather than evenly across the room.
That is worth designing for rather than fighting. Position the opening so its light falls into the widest bay rather than straight onto a beam. Splay the internal reveal outwards towards the room so the light spreads instead of landing as a hard rectangle. And accept that dark oak and deep coloured lime plaster absorb a great deal, so the glazing area belongs at the upper end of the fifteen to twenty per cent of floor area guide rather than the lower.
The nineteenth century houses towards Colchester Road
Coggeshall did not stop building in sixteen hundred. Along the Colchester Road, out past the older core, there is Victorian and Edwardian stock: brick built, two storeys, Welsh slate or plain clay tile, hand cut rafters at four hundred centres with a purlin at mid span.
These are ordinary roofs and they behave in ordinary ways. A rafter can be trimmed, the rafters either side doubled, trimmers fixed at head and sill, and load carried around the opening down to the wall plate. Where the roof has been re-covered in concrete interlocking tile the flashing kit changes to suit the deeper profile. Many of these houses sit outside the conservation area boundary, which makes them the most straightforward work in the parish.
Post-war housing at Highfields and Tilkey
The twentieth century estates sit on the edges of the town, out towards Tilkey and on the Highfields side, and they could be anywhere in Essex. Concrete interlocking tile, shallower pitches than the historic core, and trussed rafter roofs from the mid sixties onwards.
The truss is the governing constraint. Its webs are engineered components carrying load, so units are sized to fit the clear gap between trusses rather than cut through them, which usually caps a single opening at something under six hundred millimetres wide. Two units in adjacent bays give the same area of glass and leave the structure untouched. Coggeshall therefore needs two entirely different first conversations depending on which side of the town the house is on.
Flat roofed additions behind the listed frontages
Behind a great many Coggeshall houses is a twentieth century rear addition with a flat roof, and these are frequently the easiest place in the whole building to put a decent area of glass. The fabric is modern, the view from the street is nil, and the roof plane faces the entire sky.
The kerb is what decides whether it lasts. One hundred and fifty millimetres from the finished roof surface to the top of the upstand, the covering dressed up all four sides and terminated under the unit, and a fall of at least one in eighty across the roof so water leaves rather than lies. Where an old addition has settled and now holds water, the fall is put right before the glass goes in. A flat rooflight on a sound kerb is a very quiet, very effective answer in a house where the historic roof cannot be touched.
Working on Stoneham Street and West Street
Access here is genuinely difficult and it belongs in the price honestly. The streets are narrow, the frontages meet the pavement, and a good many buildings have no vehicle access to the rear at all.
Scaffold standing on the footway or in the carriageway needs a licence from the highway authority and that takes lead time. Tying a scaffold into a listed elevation is not done casually, so ties go through window openings or the structure is designed to stand free. Where there is no side gate, materials and waste travel through the house on boards under sheets along a route agreed in advance. The roof is closed and watertight at the end of every working day, which matters more on a building with lath and plaster ceilings under it than on anything modern.
Consent, notification and the order they happen in
Two separate processes run on most Coggeshall jobs. Listed building consent, or planning where an Article 4 direction has removed permitted development rights in the conservation area. And the Building Regulations notification, covering Part L for thermal performance, Part K where there is a risk of falling, and Part B where an opening serves as escape from a converted room.
Sunspire handles the Regulations notification as part of the job, through Braintree District Council or an approved inspector. The consent application is the one that sets the programme, because it takes weeks rather than days and it determines which unit is being notified. Nothing gets ordered until the first is settled, which is why an early conversation saves more time here than anywhere else in the county.
Starting a Coggeshall enquiry
Sunspire travels to Coggeshall from Chelmsford, an easy run and comfortably inside the thirty miles by road the business covers. The town sits in the same district as Braintree, and the wider county is set out on the areas we cover page.
Start the first email with the listing. The address, whether the building is listed and at what grade if you know it, and whether it sits in the conservation area. Then two photographs: the rear of the building from as far back in the plot as you can stand, and the ceiling of the room you want lit. Add the room dimensions and the covering if you can see it. That is enough for a realistic range and a straight answer about which slopes are likely to work. A fixed written figure follows a survey, and the costs page sets out what moves it.
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We start with the building, the covering and the slope. Then we tell you what will suit it, and what it will cost, as a fixed written number.
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