Roof Lantern Installation
Flat-roof glazing sized to the room and detailed into the kerb below it.
View this service →
Mid Essex
Rooflight installation in Ingatestone
Historic high street, listed frontages. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
We travel to Ingatestone
10-year guarantee
IngatestoneTown covered
Mid EssexWithin
30Mile radius by road
10Year workmanship guarantee
In Ingatestone
What we install on Ingatestone 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.
View this service →
The local detail
16 things worth knowing about Ingatestone roofs
Ingatestone grew along a Roman road and never really left it. The High Street is a continuous run of buildings fronting the old route, many of them medieval or Tudor in origin and refronted in brick during the eighteenth century, with the church tower in Tudor brick behind them and Ingatestone Hall in its park to the south east. Away from that spine the village is a commuter settlement: Edwardian and interwar houses around the station, post war closes, and the larger plots out towards Fryerning.
The two halves ask different questions of a rooflight installer. On the High Street the questions are about consent, hidden roof geometry and working over a public footway. Around the station they are about hipped roofs, noise and daylight into rooms that face the wrong way. This page works through both.
- 01 A Georgian front on an older roof
- 02 Parapets, M-roofs and the valley behind the frontage
- 03 What listing actually covers
- 04 Flats and maisonettes above the shops
- 05 Scaffold over a public footway
- 06 Burgage plots, side returns and the flat roofs behind them
- 07 Hipped roofs on the interwar houses near the station
- 08 Railway and road noise, and the glass that answers it
- 09 Plain clay tiles and the Essex red brick behind them
- 10 Lead valleys, secret gutters and where a unit must not sit
- 11 Lath and plaster ceilings, and the reveal below the opening
- 12 Escape windows in a room in the roof
- 13 Fryerning, the lanes and the larger plots
- 14 Rendered elevations and the conservation area boundary
- 15 Ordering for a building with no straight lines
- 16 How an Ingatestone job is priced and notified
A Georgian front on an older roof
Walk the High Street and the elevations read as eighteenth century: flat brick or rendered fronts, sash windows, a parapet or a plain eaves line. Step behind them and the building is very often two hundred years older. Refronting was a fashion, and it was applied to timber framed houses that kept their original frame, their original roof and their original steep pitch.
For rooflight work that gap between the front and the fabric is the single most useful thing to know. The roof you are working on is not the roof the facade implies. Rafter spacing is irregular, the pitch is often over fifty degrees, the covering may have been renewed twice, and the ridge line rarely runs parallel to the street. All of it is established by getting into the roof space before a unit is discussed.
Parapets, M-roofs and the valley behind the frontage
A refronted building frequently gained a parapet, and a parapet needs a roof that does not project over it. The usual solution was an M-roof: two parallel pitched slopes running front to back with a lead lined valley between them, draining to a hopper and a downpipe at the rear.
That geometry has consequences. The valley is the drainage route for the entire roof and nothing may be placed in it or near it. The two slopes either side are narrow, often under two metres from valley to parapet, which limits unit size. And the parapet gutter behind the front wall is usually the oldest and most vulnerable lead on the building. A unit in the rear slope of the rear pitch, well clear of both, is generally the only sensible position, and it is usually enough.
On an M-roof the valley decides where the glass can go before anyone opens a brochure.
What listing actually covers
The phrase heard most often in the village is that a building has a listed frontage. Listing does not work that way. A listed building is listed in its entirety: the frame, the roof structure, the covering, the interior joinery and any object fixed to it, along with structures within the curtilage that predate July 1948. The front is simply the part that got the building listed.
Practically, that means a rooflight in a rear slope invisible from the street still needs listed building consent, because it alters listed fabric. It also means the argument for it is a fabric argument rather than a visual one: which rafters are affected, whether any historic timber is lost, and whether the work is reversible. Proposals framed that way tend to go better than proposals framed around daylight alone.
Flats and maisonettes above the shops
A large part of the High Street has commercial use at ground floor and residential above, often in flats formed within the historic building. Two things follow that catch people out.
Permitted development rights for rooflights apply to houses. They do not apply to flats or maisonettes, so any alteration to the roof of a flat needs a planning application on its own terms, before listing or the conservation area are even considered. And the roof of such a building is almost always common parts under the lease rather than demised to the flat, so the freeholder’s consent is a separate permission again. Establishing who owns the roof is the first question on a High Street enquiry, and it is quicker to answer at the outset than halfway through a design.
Scaffold over a public footway
Reaching a High Street roof means standing scaffold on or over a pavement that people walk along and a road that carries traffic. The highway authority licenses that, and the licence sets out lighting, a pedestrian route, hoarding or a gantry where the footway is fully occupied, and the insurance position.
Where the building has a shop below, a gantry over the entrance is normal so the business stays open. Where the rear can be reached from a yard or a service road instead, that route is nearly always cheaper and faster, and it is checked first. The licence has a lead time measured in weeks rather than days, so it is applied for alongside the order rather than after delivery. This is the main reason a High Street programme is longer than a suburban one for the same unit.
Burgage plots, side returns and the flat roofs behind them
The plots running back from the High Street are long, narrow and medieval in origin, and they have been filled in progressively for four centuries. The result behind most frontages is a sequence of rear wings, outshots and twentieth century single storey additions, with a fair amount of flat roof among them.
Those flat roofs are often the best daylight opportunity on the whole property. They are invisible from the street, they sit over kitchens and back rooms that have windows facing a two metre gap, and a flush flat rooflight in them lights the space without touching the historic range at all. The constraint is the fall. Many of these roofs were laid decades ago and drain poorly, so the fall is checked and corrected before glass is set into them.
Hipped roofs on the interwar houses near the station
The streets around the station carry a large stock of nineteen twenties and thirties semis and detached houses with hipped roofs in concrete interlocking or clay tile. A hipped roof gives less usable slope than a gabled one, because each plane is a trapezium narrowing towards the top and bounded by hip rafters carrying load down to the corners.
A unit therefore has to sit within the parallel section of the plane, clear of the hip rafters at each side and clear of the ridge above. On a typical rear hip that leaves a workable zone perhaps two metres wide and a metre and a half tall. It is enough for one generous roof window or two narrow ones. The general principles are on rooflights in a hipped roof; the local point is that the rear plane on these houses is usually the shortest one on the building.
Railway and road noise, and the glass that answers it
Ingatestone has the Great Eastern main line running through it and the A12 immediately to the north east, and a good number of houses sit within earshot of both. A rooflight is the thinnest element in a roof, so it is the element that transmits most sound, and putting one over a bedroom in these streets deserves a moment’s specification thought.
Acoustic performance comes from mass, from asymmetry and from a damping interlayer. A unit with panes of two different thicknesses breaks up the resonant frequency that two matched panes reinforce, and an acoustic laminate in the outer pane absorbs vibration that a single sheet passes straight through. Both are order time choices. The detail sits on acoustic glazing and rain noise, and the same specification handles heavy rain as a useful side effect.
Plain clay tiles and the Essex red brick behind them
The predominant older covering in the village is a plain clay tile, hand made on the earliest buildings and machine made from the late nineteenth century, laid double lap at a steep pitch over riven or sawn laths. It takes a plain tile flashing kit with soakers dressed between the courses, which is straightforward provided the kit matches the tile gauge.
Two local variations complicate it. Some High Street roofs carry a mixture of hand made and machine made tiles from successive campaigns of work, so the gauge changes across one slope. And several buildings have decorative bands of fishtail or club tiles that must be kept and re-laid in position. Both are handled by stripping wider than the opening, keeping every tile in order, and setting the unit where the gauge is consistent.
Lead valleys, secret gutters and where a unit must not sit
Buildings that grew by accretion have a great many internal angles, and every internal angle is a valley. Behind the High Street there are open lead valleys, secret gutters running behind a wall, back gutters above stacks, and abutments where a later wing meets an older one.
Every one of those concentrates water from two roof planes into one line. A rooflight flashing placed within that line is asking to intercept the entire catchment of the roof at its weakest point. The working discipline is a clear three hundred millimetres of undisturbed covering between the outside of any unit flashing and the outside of any valley, gutter or abutment detail, measured on the slope. Where the available plane is too small for that, the honest answer is that the plane will not take a unit, and a different slope is used.
Lath and plaster ceilings, and the reveal below the opening
Under an old roof the ceiling is frequently lime plaster on riven laths, sometimes with the original hair plaster intact. It is brittle, it does not take a screw, and it cracks in sympathy across a whole ceiling if the structure above it is disturbed carelessly.
Forming a reveal through it is a careful cutting job rather than a plasterboard job. The opening is cut back to a lath bearing on sound joists, the edges are stabilised, and the new lining is built independently so it is not hanging off historic plaster. It is worth splaying that lining outwards towards the room, because a splayed reveal spreads light across the ceiling instead of dropping a hard edged rectangle onto the floor, and on a deep old roof build-up the difference is considerable.
Escape windows in a room in the roof
Where a loft has been converted, or is being converted, an opening in the roof may be doing a fire safety job as well as a daylight one. Part B sets a clear opening area and a minimum dimension for an escape window, together with a maximum sill height above the floor and a limit on the drop outside.
That combination pushes the unit down the slope and fixes its size, so it is a design input rather than a preference. On a steeply pitched High Street roof a top hung unit generally satisfies it more comfortably than a centre pivot, because the sash swings clear and leaves the whole opening usable. It is settled with Building Control before the order, since a unit chosen for its proportions and then found not to meet the clear opening is an expensive discovery.
Fryerning, the lanes and the larger plots
North west of the village, Fryerning has a different character again: scattered houses on generous plots, some Victorian and Edwardian, some post war, along lanes with no footway. The buildings are less constrained by consent and more constrained by access and by trees.
On these plots there is usually room for a lorry mounted platform, but the ground is often soft and mature planting stands between the road and the elevation. Ground protection and a route agreed in advance solve most of it. Structurally the later houses here are cut roofs with purlins rather than trussed, which means opening sizes are limited by the purlin line rather than by a truss web, and that line is found before a unit size is chosen.
Rendered elevations and the conservation area boundary
The conservation area covers the High Street and the historic core, and its character is a mixture of exposed frame, colourwashed render and plain brick under steep tiled roofs. The test for a rooflight is whether it preserves or enhances that character, judged from public vantage points.
In practice a flush conservation pattern unit on a rear slope satisfies it comfortably, and a modern white surround standing proud of a front slope does not. It is worth checking the boundary itself, because it runs along the backs of plots in places and a house on one side of a lane may be inside while its neighbour is outside. A five minute check against the council mapping settles it, and it happens before an order rather than after one.
Ordering for a building with no straight lines
The final practical point on an old Ingatestone roof is tolerance. Rafters are not parallel, the covering is not in one plane, and a nominal opening size measured from a drawing will be wrong by twenty millimetres somewhere. Standard unit sizes still work, but the opening is set out on site from the actual timber and the unit is ordered afterwards.
That sequence matters for lead times. A standard size from stock arrives quickly. A made to measure unit, a special glazing specification or a conservation pattern in a non standard size can take considerably longer, so the survey happens early enough for the order to sit comfortably ahead of the scaffold rather than behind it.
How an Ingatestone job is priced and notified
A range by email once the room, the plane and the covering are known, then a fixed written figure after a survey. On a High Street building that survey covers the roof void, the valley and gutter layout, the ownership of the roof, and the access position over the footway. On a station area house it is a shorter exercise, usually settled in an hour.
Building Control notification is handled as part of the job. Where consent is needed, that position is established first. Sunspire travels to the village from Chelmsford, as it does to Margaretting and Shenfield either side of it, and the full list is on the areas we cover page. The roof is closed and watertight at the end of every working day, and the workmanship carries a ten year guarantee.
Also covered
Near Ingatestone
Get a quote
Tell us about your roof
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