Roof Lantern Installation
Flat-roof glazing sized to the room and detailed into the kerb below it.
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Uttlesford
Rooflight installation in Felsted
School village, listed cottages. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
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UttlesfordWithin
30Mile radius by road
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In Felsted
What we install on Felsted 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
16 things worth knowing about Felsted roofs
Felsted is really several settlements sharing one parish name, and a rooflight enquiry means something different in each. There is the village proper around Holy Cross church and the old Grammar School, where the listed cottages and the school’s Victorian buildings sit close together. There are the greens strung out across the parish at Bannister Green, Watch House Green, Cobblers Green and Willows Green, each a loose ring of cottages around open grass. And there is Flitch Green, a village built from scratch on the site of the old sugar beet factory, where every roof is under twenty five years old.
Sunspire travels out from Chelmsford, about twelve miles south west of the parish, and Uttlesford is one of the districts covered across the Essex area served. What follows is what these roofs actually present once a covering comes off: the thatch and peg tile in the old village, the Welsh slate on the school range, the engineered timber at Flitch Green, and the access problems that come with working around a school and a green.
- 01 The old village core, and what the listing covers
- 02 Thatch across the parish, and where glass goes instead
- 03 Peg tile and pantile on the older cottages
- 04 The school range, and Victorian Gothic slate
- 05 Steep pitches and multiple gables
- 06 Cottages around the greens, and the ground a scaffold stands on
- 07 Working around a school term
- 08 Timber frame, lime render and the walls beside an opening
- 09 Listed building consent, and the order it comes in
- 10 Former farm buildings and the brewery conversions
- 11 Flitch Green, and a village where every roof is the same age
- 12 Design codes and title conditions on a planned village
- 13 Matching a tile the developer specified
- 14 Flat roofs on rear additions across the parish
- 15 Open ground, exposure and the height of an upstand
- 16 Getting a Felsted roof surveyed and priced
The old village core, and what the listing covers
The centre of the village carries a conservation area and a heavy concentration of listed buildings, including the jettied and carved range by the church that housed the original school. On buildings of that age the listing reaches the roof carpentry, not just the elevations.
What that means in practice is that the loft is inspected before any product is discussed. Where the structure is historic, the opening is sized to fit between two existing rafters without cutting either, which on a medieval or Tudor frame at roughly four hundred millimetre centres caps the width at something narrow. That is a property of the building rather than a starting position, and it is better established in week one than week six.
Thatch across the parish, and where glass goes instead
There is a good deal of thatch in and around Felsted, particularly on the cottages around the greens, and thatch takes no rooflight. There is no dependable way to terminate a deep, flexible, breathing covering against a rigid frame, and the depth of the coat makes any flashing a permanent weakness.
Daylight in a thatched cottage comes from somewhere else. An eyebrow dormer is a thatcher’s job. More usefully, most of these cottages have gained a rear addition at some point with a tiled or flat roof over it, and that is where the kitchen usually is and where the household spends its day. It also sits out of sight of the green, which shortens the consent conversation.
Peg tile and pantile on the older cottages
Where the old stock is not thatched it is generally handmade clay plain tile, with some pantile appearing on outbuildings and later ranges. The two want quite different treatment at an opening.
Plain tile is flat and small, and the flashing works with soakers dressed between the courses, cut to the tiles that are actually there rather than to a nominal gauge. Pantile has an S profile with a deep trough, and the kit has to bridge that depth or the apron sits over fresh air on one side of every tile. Using the nearest kit in the van rather than the correct one is how a roof window ends up with a proud flashing and a slow water track three winters later.
The school range, and Victorian Gothic slate
The school gives the village a scale of building that a village of this size would not otherwise have: nineteenth century Gothic ranges and boarding houses in brick and stone with steeply pitched Welsh slate roofs, high ridges, and gables that break the plane repeatedly.
The domestic relevance is that a good deal of village housing was built alongside and in the same idiom, so slate at a steep pitch on cut timber with purlins turns up on ordinary houses here more than in neighbouring villages. Slate is thin, flat and brittle. It takes a low profile kit dressed tight, and it is stripped in whole courses with a ripper rather than levered out individually, then re-laid with new copper nails and a run of matching salvage held ready.
Steep pitches and multiple gables
A steeply pitched roof with several gables looks generous from the ground and offers less usable plane than it appears to. Every gable, hip and valley takes area out of the slope, and the remaining clear runs are narrower than the roof outline suggests.
Position therefore matters as much as size. A valley is the one place glass never goes, because it is the drainage path for two planes and interrupting it concentrates water at exactly the wrong point. The workable area is the clear middle of a plane with room for a full flashing all round, and on a broken roof line that can be a surprisingly small target. Marking it out at survey is how the drawing stops being optimistic.
Cottages around the greens, and the ground a scaffold stands on
Bannister Green, Watch House Green, Cobblers Green and Willows Green all follow the same pattern: cottages facing open grass, often with no formal boundary, no hardstanding and no rear access.
That is an access problem rather than a roofing one. A scaffold standing on soft grass wants proper sole plates to spread the load, and in a wet January the approach for a delivery lorry is the limiting factor rather than the scaffold itself. Where the green is common land or maintained by the parish, permission to stand on it is a separate conversation. All of it is manageable and none of it is quick if it is raised on the morning of the first day.
Working around a school term
The school runs a working village, and it shows in the traffic. Term-time mornings and afternoons put a concentration of vehicles through a network of narrow lanes with limited passing, and drop-off and collection times are fixed.
For a job on a lane near the school that changes the logistics rather than the specification. Deliveries and skip exchanges get scheduled outside those windows, and where a vehicle has to stand partly on the carriageway it is worth doing so mid-morning. It is a small thing that keeps a two day job to two days, and it is the sort of detail settled at survey rather than discovered by a lorry driver at half past eight.
Timber frame, lime render and the walls beside an opening
The older cottages are timber frame with lime render or lath and plaster over, usually limewashed. These walls are soft, thin and considerably less substantial than they look from the lane.
Neither a ladder foot nor a scaffold tie belongs against them. Render on riven lath is frequently twenty millimetres of material with a void behind it and no masonry at all, so a platform on this kind of building stands free and ties back only to genuinely solid brickwork elsewhere. Establishing what the wall is made of at survey is how an elevation stays as it was found.
Listed building consent, and the order it comes in
Listed building consent is a separate matter from planning permission and covers alterations affecting character, internally as well as externally. A building in the village core can need both, and they run alongside each other rather than one substituting for the other.
Where consent is granted on a historic slope, the specification is normally a conservation rooflight: a small flush unit in a slim black cast frame with a central glazing bar, sitting in the plane of the tiles so it reads as a lead-lined opening from the ground. These are made to size with a lead time in weeks, so the order follows the decision notice.
On a listed Felsted cottage the sequence runs consent, then survey, then order, and reversing it is the one step that cannot be taken back.
Former farm buildings and the brewery conversions
Felsted has a long agricultural and brewing history and the resulting conversions are scattered across the parish: barns, cart lodges, maltings and former brewery buildings turned into living space.
They share one daylight problem. These buildings were designed with almost no openings, and cutting new ones into the elevations undoes the character the consent was granted to preserve. Roof glazing is the usual resolution and it works well, because the roofs are large, the volumes are tall and the light travels deep into the plan. The structure is often heavy timber or steel at wide centres, which gives more freedom on width than a house does, and the ventilation of the roof build-up is designed rather than assumed.
Flitch Green, and a village where every roof is the same age
Flitch Green is the other end of the parish in every sense. Built on the site of the old sugar beet factory from the early two thousands, it is a planned settlement of closely set houses with a consistent palette of materials, and the roofs are all from the same two decades.
They are trussed rafter construction with concrete interlocking tile at pitches in the mid thirties, and they behave predictably. The covering is consistent, the correct deep profile kit is available off the shelf, and the ceiling below is plasterboard on a modern joist. The constraint is width. A truss carries load through its webs and bottom chord, so a roof window is sized to fit between two of them, capping the structural opening at around five hundred and fifty millimetres at six hundred centres.
Design codes and title conditions on a planned village
Estates built to a masterplan usually carry conditions that outlast the developer. Permitted development rights are sometimes restricted by planning condition on a plot like this, and title covenants can add a separate requirement to seek approval for alterations to the external appearance.
Those are two different mechanisms with two different people to ask, and neither shows up on a roof survey. Checking both before an order is placed takes an afternoon and avoids a much longer conversation afterwards. Where a management company holds responsibility for the estate’s shared areas, access and parking during the work is worth confirming with them at the same time.
Matching a tile the developer specified
On a newer plot the roof covering was chosen to satisfy a planning condition rather than picked from a catalogue, and the exact profile in the exact colour may no longer be in production.
Where it is still made, an opening is formed and made good invisibly. Where it has been superseded, the options are salvage from a matching batch or accepting a slight difference in tone that weathers in over a couple of seasons. Either way it belongs in the survey findings, not in a conversation on the day the covering comes off.
Flat roofs on rear additions across the parish
Old cottage or new house, the single storey rear addition is the most common piece of building work in Felsted, and the roof over it is flat: felt, single ply or GRP. This is where most of the parish’s glass actually ends up.
Two measurements come first. The fall, designed at a minimum of 1:80 to allow for deflection and construction tolerance, which a lot of older decks never delivered. And the deck itself, because chipboard under a covering laid over twice will not carry a kerb. Where water stands more than a couple of days after rain, the fall is sorted first and a flat rooflight or lantern goes into a roof that drains.
Open ground, exposure and the height of an upstand
The parish is arable land with settlements dropped into it, and most of the greens have open fields on at least two sides. Exposure does not change which product suits a roof. It changes the numbers in the detail.
One hundred and fifty millimetres from the finished roof surface to the top of the kerb is the industry figure, derived from the depth of water that can lie on a flat roof plus the height wind driven rain can be driven up a vertical face. On a plot with a clear run across fields that is the floor rather than the target. Cutting it so a lantern sits lower for appearance is invisible when the job is finished and expensive to put right later.
Getting a Felsted roof surveyed and priced
The survey settles six things: what the covering is and whether matching salvage will be needed, the pitch measured rather than estimated, what is holding the roof up and whether it is historic fabric or engineered timber, where the internal ceiling line sits and how deep the reveal will be, which designations and conditions apply to the address, and how materials get up and waste comes down.
Sunspire quotes in two stages: a range by email once the basics are known, then a fixed written figure after that visit. For the first, a photograph of the roof from outside, one of the ceiling from inside and a rough room size is usually enough. The general ground on what drives the price is set out separately, and neighbouring work in Great Notley and Braintree falls under a different authority.
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Near Felsted
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