Roof Lantern Installation
Flat-roof glazing sized to the room and detailed into the kerb below it.
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West Essex
Rooflight installation in Epping
Forest-edge town, conservation area. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
We travel to Epping
10-year guarantee
EppingTown covered
West EssexWithin
30Mile radius by road
10Year workmanship guarantee
In Epping
What we install on Epping roofs
Flat Roof Rooflight Installation
Flush and kerb-mounted units into single-ply, felt and GRP flat roofs.
View this service →Roof Window Installation
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
17 things worth knowing about Epping roofs
Epping sits on a ridge with the forest on one side of it and the Roding valley falling away on the other. The town is essentially one long, wide market street with narrow plots running back from it, a pattern set out in the middle ages and still visible in the shape of every rear garden. The High Street is a conservation area, a good deal of the fabric along it is listed, and beyond the built edge almost everything is Green Belt or forest land.
Practically, that means a rooflight in Epping usually involves three questions before anybody discusses glass: what the roof is made of, who can see it, and what permission the address actually carries. This page works through all three, and through the ordinary business of what an Epping roof needs from a flashing detail.
- 01 Burgage plots, and the roofs hiding behind the High Street
- 02 The conservation area, and what the High Street can see
- 03 Article 4 directions, and the rights they remove
- 04 Listed buildings, and why consent reaches the rafters
- 05 Sizing an opening to the timbers that are already there
- 06 Slate roofs, and the ones that were re-covered in concrete
- 07 What is on an Epping roof
- 08 Working with slate rather than tile
- 09 The forest edge, and the canopy over the western side
- 10 Protected trees, and where a scaffold can bear
- 11 Leaf fall on a forest edge roof
- 12 Deep plans, dark middles and how the light gets in
- 13 Coopersale and the trussed estates
- 14 Orientation on a ridge between two valleys
- 15 Market day, the High Street and where a lorry stands
- 16 What the survey settles in Epping
- 17 Getting an Epping enquiry moving
Burgage plots, and the roofs hiding behind the High Street
The long thin plots running back from the market street are medieval in origin, and they produced a very particular building form: a narrow frontage onto the street, then range after range added behind it as the centuries went on. A single address can carry three or four roofs of different dates, different pitches and different coverings, connected by valleys and abutments.
For a rooflight that is mostly good news, because a rear range is out of public view and often the ideal place to put light into a dark middle room. The complication is geometry. Those roofs are narrow, so a unit needs its clear margin of covering on all four sides, and the valleys between ranges eat into the available plane. Six hundred millimetres of clean covering below the opening and three or four courses above it is the comfortable minimum.
The conservation area, and what the High Street can see
The town centre is designated, and the test applied to a rooflight inside a conservation area is whether the work preserves or enhances the character of the area. That is a design brief rather than a barrier, and it resolves into a short list.
The unit sits flush with the plane of the covering rather than proud of it. The frame is slim and dark rather than wide and white. There is a central vertical glazing bar, because that is what a historic rooflight had. And the position is chosen on a slope the public street cannot see, which on a burgage plot is usually straightforward. The conservation rooflight pattern is built to satisfy exactly that description.
On a designated High Street address the design question is not whether a rooflight is allowed, it is which slope it lands on.
Article 4 directions, and the rights they remove
Permitted development normally allows a householder to fit a rooflight without a planning application, subject to two conditions: the unit must not project more than one hundred and fifty millimetres beyond the plane of the existing roof slope, and it must not sit higher than the highest part of the roof.
An Article 4 direction removes named permitted development rights inside a defined boundary, and conservation areas are where they are usually found. Where a direction covers roof alterations, an application is needed for work that would otherwise be automatic, and it is judged on the design points above. Permitted development also does not apply to flats or maisonettes, and it is frequently restricted by planning condition on newer estates. Checking which of those applies to a specific address takes minutes and happens before anything is ordered.
Listed buildings, and why consent reaches the rafters
Listing covers a building inside and out, and on the older High Street properties the roof carpentry is often the oldest surviving element. Rafters, purlins, wind braces and the joints between them can predate the brick front by a long way.
Listed building consent is a separate matter from planning permission and is required for alterations affecting character. Rooflights are consented on listed buildings regularly, and the route to it is consistent: a secondary rear slope, a conservation pattern unit, and an opening sized to fit between existing timbers so that nothing historic is cut. Establishing what is actually up there before the design is fixed is what keeps that conversation short.
Sizing an opening to the timbers that are already there
On a historic roof the design sequence inverts. Rather than picking a unit and working out how to trim for it, the surviving members are located first and the opening is sized to fit between them.
That tends to produce a narrower, taller unit than a modern brief expects, and it often means two smaller windows in adjacent bays rather than one wide one. The daylight result is very close, the consent argument becomes simple, and the roof carries on doing what it has done for a few hundred years. Finding the members means lifting a small area of covering and looking, which is an hour at survey rather than a discovery on the second morning.
Slate roofs, and the ones that were re-covered in concrete
Welsh slate went onto a great many Victorian roofs in the town, and a fair number of those roofs were re-covered in the nineteen sixties and seventies with concrete interlocking tile, which is considerably heavier.
Two things follow. The flashing kit is chosen by what is on the roof now rather than by what the building looks like it should have, and a deep pan concrete tile needs a kit designed for that depth or the apron bridges the troughs. And the structure underneath deserves a look, because a roof designed for slate and later loaded with concrete has been working harder than it was drawn to, and that occasionally shows as deflection in the rafters that has to be understood before an opening is cut into them.
What is on an Epping roof
The covering selects the detail, and the range within the town is wide.
| Covering | Where it appears | What the detail needs |
|---|---|---|
| Natural slate | Victorian and Edwardian houses, High Street rear ranges | Low profile kit dressed tight, courses re-hung on hooks or nails |
| Handmade clay plain tile | The oldest buildings and rear ranges | Soaker kit dressed to follow a cambered, uneven plane |
| Clay pantile | Outbuildings and some older ranges | Low profile kit sized to the roll, generous side cover |
| Concrete interlocking tile | Interwar semis, Coopersale and the post-war estates | Deep profile kit matched to the pan depth |
| Felt, GRP and single ply | Rear extensions and garage roofs across the town | Membrane dressed up a kerb and terminated under the unit |
Working with slate rather than tile
Opening a slate roof is a different trade from opening a tiled one. Slates are hung on nails or hooks with a head lap rather than sitting on a nib, so getting into the covering means releasing courses above the opening and re-hanging them afterwards, and a slate ripper does more of the work than a hammer.
Slate is also thin, flat and brittle, which is why it takes a low profile flashing kit dressed tight to the surface rather than a soaker kit built for depth. Where breakage forces replacement, second hand slates of matching size and thickness are the right answer, because a new imported slate next to a hundred year old Welsh one is visible from the road for the first decade.
The forest edge, and the canopy over the western side
Epping Forest reaches the town at Bell Common and wraps around the western and southern edges, and the houses on that side sit under or beside mature beech, oak and hornbeam.
Canopy changes sizing. The usual rule of thumb, glazing area at fifteen to twenty per cent of the floor area of the room below, assumes an unobstructed view of the sky. Under a summer canopy that assumption is generous, and the light that does arrive has been filtered green. The honest response is more glazed area, or a unit placed in the plane with the clearest sightline to the northern sky, or both. A well aimed smaller rooflight beats a large one pointed into the crown of a beech.
Protected trees, and where a scaffold can bear
Trees on and around the forest edge are protected, individually by order or by their position on forest land, and a great many garden trees elsewhere in the town carry preservation orders as well.
That does not affect the roof; it affects the route to it. Scaffold standards bearing inside a root protection area, or a delivery vehicle tracking across one, is work the council takes seriously. Ground protection boards to spread the load, a repositioned tower, or an agreed access route are the usual answers, and pruning a protected branch that overhangs the working slope needs consent in its own right. Identified at survey it is a footnote. Discovered on the morning it stops the job.
Leaf fall on a forest edge roof
Beech and hornbeam drop a great deal of material onto roofs between October and December, and a rooflight upstand is an obstruction that collects it. Leaves gather on the upslope side, hold moisture against the covering, and encourage moss on the tiles or slates around them. On a flat roof the same material migrates towards the outlets.
The maintenance is a gloved hand around the kerb and along the gutters once each autumn. Choosing a position that is not a natural collecting point removes part of the problem permanently. Most water trouble around rooflights begins as a drainage route that quietly closed itself.
Deep plans, dark middles and how the light gets in
The narrow frontage and long depth that the burgage pattern produced leaves a lot of Epping houses with rooms several metres from any external wall. A bathroom, an inner hall or a landing can have no window at all.
Where a roof edge exists above, a small roof window in a rear range slope solves it outright. Where there is none, a sun tunnel does the job: a collector on the outer surface feeding a rigid, highly reflective duct down to a flush diffuser in the ceiling. The tube wants the shortest and straightest run the void allows, since every bend costs light, and on these houses the void is often crowded with old chimney breasts and later pipework. The route is confirmed at survey with the loft open.
Coopersale and the trussed estates
Away from the historic core the stock changes completely. Coopersale, Ivy Chimneys and the post-war estates around the town use trussed rafters, usually a fink pattern at six hundred centres, under concrete interlocking tile.
A truss is an engineered component. Its webs and bottom chord carry load in tension and compression, so cutting one is a structural act rather than a carpentry choice. Roof windows on those roofs are sized to pass between trusses, which caps the clear width at around five hundred and fifty millimetres unless an engineer designs a trimming solution with proprietary hangers. Two narrow units in adjacent bays gives close to the same daylight and needs no calculation at all.
Orientation on a ridge between two valleys
The town runs along high ground, so most of its principal roof planes face broadly east and west rather than north and south. That is worth knowing, because east and west behave quite differently from each other.
An east facing plane is bright early and calm by the afternoon, which suits a kitchen and is a genuine problem over a bedroom in June, when the sun arrives before five. A west facing plane collects low, hot late sun that comes in under any internal blind and sits directly in the eye. Solar control glass handles the heat on both. Blackout provision, ordered with the unit because the channels are part of the frame, handles the rest.
Market day, the High Street and where a lorry stands
Access in the centre is the ordinary problem of a working market town with one main street. The High Street carries loading restrictions and a good deal of traffic, the market takes space on its day, and rear access to the older properties is usually through a passage or a shared yard rather than a driveway.
A bay suspension arranged in advance with the council puts materials next to the building rather than several streets away. Where the rear range can only be reached on foot, scaffold goes in by hand, which is time rather than difficulty, and it belongs in the fixed figure. The roof is stripped, opened, weathered and closed within the same working day, and left watertight overnight whatever the forecast is doing.
What the survey settles in Epping
The survey establishes the covering and its condition, the measured pitch, whether the structure is historic carpentry, a later cut roof or trussed rafters, and where the internal ceiling line lands, since that decides the reveal. On a designated or listed address it also settles the consent position before anything is ordered.
It is where the awkward facts appear as well: a purlin running through a proposed opening, a rear range with two different coverings on one plane, a rafter deflected under a heavier tile than it was designed for. Finding those before a price is agreed is the reason the survey exists.
Getting an Epping enquiry moving
The Building Control notification is handled as part of the job, and on a listed or designated address the consent position is established first. Sunspire gives a range by email once the roof plane, covering and room are known, then a fixed written figure once the survey has confirmed structure and access. Sunspire fits new rooflights and replaces units that have reached the end of their working life.
The rest of west Essex works the same way, including Loughton, Ongar and Harlow, and the full list of towns and villages sits on the areas we cover page. The workmanship carries a ten year guarantee.
Also covered
Near Epping
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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.
- Surveyed before it is priced
- 10-year workmanship guarantee
- Building Control notification handled
- New installations and replacements