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 Great Dunmow
Market town, Georgian and modern edge. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
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In Great Dunmow
What we install on Great Dunmow 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 Great Dunmow roofs
Great Dunmow has grown faster in the last twenty years than in the previous hundred, and a rooflight enquiry from the town lands in one of two very different places. The Market Place, High Street, White Street and Stortford Road frontages are an old market town wearing Georgian brick, with a conservation area over most of it. North and west of that, beyond the ring of interwar houses, sit estates built from the nineteen seventies onwards and a large volume of housing put up since 2010. The roof tells you which Dunmow you are in long before the postcode does.
Sunspire travels out to the town from Chelmsford, thirteen miles or so to the south east, and Uttlesford is one of the districts covered across the wider Essex service area. What follows is what the local stock actually presents once a covering is lifted: slate and plain tile on the old town roofs, the parapets that Georgian refronting left behind, and the engineered timber on almost everything built since.
- 01 Where the market town stops and the estates begin
- 02 Georgian fronts, and the older roof behind them
- 03 Parapets, and the roof space they hide
- 04 Welsh slate on the town centre roofs
- 05 Plain clay tile on the rear ranges
- 06 The conservation area, and which slope faces the Market Place
- 07 Listed buildings, and the consent that runs before the order
- 08 Maltings, and buildings that were never houses
- 09 Woodlands Park and the estates north of the town
- 10 Matching a covering the developer chose
- 11 Flat roofs behind the town, and the falls on them
- 12 Upstand heights on an exposed Uttlesford plot
- 13 The old A120, the bypass and where the traffic went
- 14 Loft conversions on the Stansted and London side
- 15 Scaffold, market day and the town centre streets
- 16 Uttlesford Building Control, and the certificate at the end
- 17 What the survey has to settle in Great Dunmow
Where the market town stops and the estates begin
The historic town is small. It runs from the Doctor’s Pond end of the High Street, through the Market Place and down Stortford Road, with White Street and New Street holding most of the older domestic fabric. Walk ten minutes in any direction from there and the building dates jump by two centuries.
That boundary matters because it decides whether the first phone call is about glass or about consent. Inside the old town the design question is settled by the district before the product question is settled by the roof. Outside it, on an estate plot, the roof itself is the only thing setting limits, and the job usually moves quickly.
Georgian fronts, and the older roof behind them
A good number of the High Street and Market Place buildings look Georgian and are not. Refronting was fashionable in the eighteenth century: an owner added a flat brick facade with sash windows to a timber-framed building that already stood there, leaving a medieval or Tudor structure behind a polite front.
The consequence for a roof job is that the elevation and the roof are from different centuries and follow different rules. Behind that brick front you can find a steeply pitched frame at fifty degrees, oak wall plates, and a roof line that does not run parallel with the street. Nothing about the front tells you what the survey will find, which is why the loft is looked at before any product is discussed.
Parapets, and the roof space they hide
Georgian refronting frequently raised the front wall above the roof line to form a parapet, with a lead-lined gutter running along the back of it. From the street the roof disappears entirely. From inside the loft there is a narrow, awkward zone where the gutter, the wall plate and the rafter feet all compete for the same space.
Glass does not belong in that zone. A rooflight set close to a parapet gutter interrupts the one drainage path the front of the building has, and the space is too tight to build a proper upstand and dress a covering up it. On these buildings the useful roof is the rear plane or the later back addition, and that is nearly always where the daylight is wanted anyway.
Welsh slate on the town centre roofs
Slate arrived in Dunmow with the railway and covers a great deal of the town centre stock, either as the original covering on nineteenth century building or as a Victorian re-covering of something older that had been tiled.
Slate is thin, flat and rigid, and it takes a low profile flashing kit dressed tight to the surface. It is also brittle and it is fixed with nails, so slates are stripped back with a ripper in whole courses either side of an opening rather than levered out individually. Re-laying takes new copper nails and, where the original slates are thin Welsh, a proportion of matching salvage held ready before the roof is opened.
Plain clay tile on the rear ranges
Behind the slated fronts, the back wings and outshuts around White Street and New Street are usually still in plain clay tile, often handmade, often steeply pitched, and often laid to an irregular gauge that no modern batten spacing matches.
A plain tile kit weathers a roof window with soakers dressed between the courses, and on a hand-made roof each soaker is cut to the tiles that are actually present rather than to a nominal figure. It is slower work than the same unit in a machine-pressed tile. The test is what the finished flashing looks like from the garden: on an uneven old roof, a kit sitting proud is obvious from thirty metres.
The conservation area, and which slope faces the Market Place
The Great Dunmow conservation area covers the historic core and a good deal of the frontage running out along Stortford Road and New Street. Within it, an Article 4 direction can remove permitted development rights, meaning a rooflight that would be permitted elsewhere requires a planning application here.
The test the district applies is the effect on the character and appearance of the area, and in practice that turns on visibility. A slope facing the Market Place or a public street is treated seriously. A rear slope behind a ridge, visible only from a private garden, is a much shorter conversation. Establishing which one you are on is the first thing done, and it costs a phone call.
Listed buildings, and the consent that runs before the order
Dunmow carries a heavy listing on the town centre frontages, and on a listed building the roof structure itself is frequently part of what is protected. That changes the question from where the light should go to which timbers may be touched at all.
Listed building consent is separate from planning permission and covers alterations affecting character, internally as well as externally. Where consent is granted the specification is usually a conservation rooflight: a slim black cast frame with a central glazing bar, fitted flush into the plane of the covering. Ordering the glass before the consent position is settled is the expensive mistake, because a bespoke unit made to the wrong size has no second use.
Maltings, and buildings that were never houses
Dunmow was a malting and brewing town, and a number of former commercial and agricultural buildings around the edge of the old core have been converted to living space. These carry a specific daylight problem: they were built with very few openings, and cutting new ones in the elevations undoes the character the consent was granted to keep.
Roof glazing is the usual resolution and it works well, because the roofs are large, the internal volumes are tall and the light travels a long way into the plan. The structure underneath is often a heavy timber or steel frame at wide centres, which gives more freedom on width than a domestic roof does, and the ventilation of the roof build-up is the detail that needs designing rather than assuming.
Woodlands Park and the estates north of the town
The modern town is where most of the volume is. The estates running north and west of the old core, including the Woodlands Park side, are trussed rafter construction with concrete interlocking tile, laid at pitches in the mid thirties, on plots with a defined building line.
These roofs behave predictably and that is their virtue. The covering is consistent, the correct deep profile flashing kit is available off the shelf, and the ceiling below is plasterboard on a modern joist. What they will not give you is width. A truss is an engineered component carrying load through its webs and bottom chord, so a roof window is sized to sit between two trusses, which at six hundred millimetre centres caps a structural opening at around five hundred and fifty millimetres.
On a trussed roof, two narrow roof windows in adjacent bays deliver more usable daylight than one wide unit that needs an engineer to make it possible.
Matching a covering the developer chose
On a newer Dunmow estate the roof covering was picked from a planning condition rather than a catalogue, and the same profile in the same colour may no longer be current by the time you want to open the roof.
This is worth checking early. Where the exact tile is still made, an opening is formed and made good invisibly. Where it has been superseded, the honest 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 is a survey finding, not a surprise on the day the covering comes off.
Flat roofs behind the town, and the falls on them
Almost every plot in Dunmow with any depth to it has gained a single storey rear addition at some point, and the roof over it is flat: felt, single ply or GRP. These are the roofs that take a flat rooflight or a lantern.
Two things get measured before anything else. The fall, which is designed at a minimum of 1:80 to allow for deflection and construction tolerance, and which plenty of nineteen nineties decks never achieved. And the deck itself, because chipboard beneath a covering that has been laid over twice is not a surface to build a kerb on. Where water stands for more than two days after rain, the fall is sorted first and the glass goes into a roof that drains.
Upstand heights on an exposed Uttlesford plot
Dunmow sits on rising ground with open arable land to the north and west and very little to break the wind. That 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 pushed up a vertical face. On an exposed plot with a clear run across fields, that figure is the floor rather than the target, and trimming it so a unit sits flatter for appearance is a decision that gets regretted in a wet February.
The old A120, the bypass and where the traffic went
The A120 was moved to a bypass south of the town, which left the B1256 running through as a local road. Noise is now concentrated along the bypass corridor and around the Stortford Road approach rather than through the Market Place.
Where a house sits close to the bypass, the ventilation strategy is what needs thought. An opening rooflight is the natural way to shift warm air out of the top of a room, but on a noisy elevation you may not want it open on a summer evening. The answer is usually to reduce the need for it: solar control glass to cut the gain, a laminated outer pane to damp both rain and traffic noise, and background ventilation elsewhere in the room.
Loft conversions on the Stansted and London side
Dunmow is a commuter town with the airport seven miles west and the Stortford line beyond it, and the resulting demand is for a home office or a fourth bedroom in the roof rather than more ground floor space.
Two glazing points matter in a conversion. Any room designated as a bedroom needs an escape route, and a roof window can serve as one where it meets the clear opening dimensions and the sill height above the floor. And the reveal is where the daylight is won or lost: splaying the lining outwards spreads the light across the ceiling and roughly doubles the apparent size of the opening for the cost of a little more plastering.
Scaffold, market day and the town centre streets
Access is the item that moves a Dunmow figure most, and it varies enormously across a small area. On an estate plot with a driveway and a side gate, materials go up and waste comes down without anybody noticing.
In the town centre it is different. Frontages sit directly on the footway, the Market Place has a weekly market on it, and there is no rear access to many of the older plots. Where a scaffold has to stand on or over the highway, a licence from Essex County Council is needed and it takes time to obtain. Establishing that at survey sets both the price and the earliest realistic start date.
Uttlesford Building Control, and the certificate at the end
Fitting a new rooflight or replacing an existing unit is notifiable work under the Building Regulations in England. It engages Part L for thermal performance, Part K where there is a risk of falling and Part B where the opening serves as a means of escape.
Sunspire handles the notification as part of the job. It matters more than it sounds. An unnotified alteration surfaces years later during a sale, when a buyer’s solicitor asks for a completion certificate that nobody ever obtained. Neighbouring work in Braintree goes through a different authority, and the applicable district is confirmed at survey rather than assumed.
What the survey has to settle in Great Dunmow
Six answers turn a range into a fixed written figure. 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 cut timber or trussed. Where the internal ceiling line sits and how deep the reveal will be. Which designations apply to the address. And how materials get up and waste gets down.
Sunspire quotes in two stages, a range by email once the basics are known and a fixed price after that visit. For the first of those, a photograph of the roof from outside, one of the ceiling from inside and a rough room size is usually enough, and the general ground on what drives the price is set out separately.
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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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