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 Sible Hedingham
Strung-out village, mixed eras. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
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Sible HedinghamTown covered
Braintree districtWithin
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In Sible Hedingham
What we install on Sible Hedingham 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 Sible Hedingham roofs
Sible Hedingham runs for the better part of two miles along the old road between Halstead and Great Yeldham, and that single fact shapes a rooflight enquiry here more than anything else does. There is no Sible Hedingham house type. At the Swan Street end the stock is timber frame, lime render and handmade clay tile. A mile north the same village covers post-war semis with concrete interlocking tiles on trussed roofs, and beyond those a scatter of bungalows, former farm buildings and newer cul-de-sacs running out towards the Colne.
Sunspire travels to the village from Chelmsford, roughly twenty miles south, as one of the northern edges of the Essex area covered. What follows is what the local stock actually presents once the covering comes off: the tiles, the structure underneath them, the conservation boundary around the church, and the exposure that comes with open valley farmland on three sides.
- 01 A village strung out along one road, and what that does to a survey
- 02 Handmade clay peg tiles, and the Hedingham brickfields
- 03 Setting a flashing into a handmade tile roof
- 04 Weatherboard, render and the walls a scaffold stands against
- 05 Post-war housing on the estates off the main road
- 06 Trussed rafter roofs, and the width they allow
- 07 Bungalows at the village edge, and shallow pitch limits
- 08 Thatched roofs in the parish, and where the daylight comes from instead
- 09 Barn conversions and cart lodges in the Colne valley
- 10 The conservation area around the church and Swan Street
- 11 Listed cottages, and the consent that comes before the order
- 12 Exposure across open farmland, and driven rain from the west
- 13 Flat roofs added since the nineteen nineties
- 14 Access on a main road frontage
- 15 Building Control notification in the Braintree district
- 16 What the survey settles on a Sible Hedingham roof
A village strung out along one road, and what that does to a survey
Ribbon development along a single through route means that two houses a few hundred metres apart can have nothing in common. The plot widths change, the building lines change, the roof pitches change and the coverings change. Nothing carries over from one job to the next except the weather.
The practical consequence is that a photograph of the roof is worth more here than a description of the address. A postcode in a planned estate tells an installer most of what is coming. A postcode on a two mile village street tells them almost nothing, so the survey does more work and the range quoted by email before it is honestly a wider range.
Handmade clay peg tiles, and the Hedingham brickfields
North Essex was brick and tile country long before it was anything else, and the Hedinghams sat on the clay that supplied it. The result across the older village stock is handmade plain tile in reds and oranges that vary within a single roof, laid at a steep pitch with a generous headlap.
Handmade tile is not dimensionally consistent. Thickness varies by a few millimetres, camber varies, and the tiles have a slight twist that gives an old roof its texture. That texture is why the roof looks right. It is also why a flashing kit made for a machine-pressed tile will not sit down properly on one, and why setting a roof window into this covering is slower and more careful work than the same unit in a modern tile.
Setting a flashing into a handmade tile roof
The kit for a plain tile roof works with soakers dressed between the tile courses, rather than an apron bridging a deep profile. On a hand-made roof the courses are not perfectly regular, so the soakers are cut and dressed to the tiles that are actually there rather than to a nominal gauge.
Tiles come off in whole courses either side of the opening and go back the same way. Old peg tiles are brittle and some will break in handling, so a proportion of matching salvage is allowed for at the start rather than sourced in a hurry halfway through. The finished job is judged from the ground: if the flashing sits proud of the surrounding tiles, the eye finds it immediately on a roof this uneven.
Weatherboard, render and the walls a scaffold stands against
Plenty of the older village properties carry painted weatherboard or a lime render over a timber frame. Both are soft surfaces. Neither takes a scaffold tie or a ladder foot without thought.
Where a rooflight goes into a slope above a boarded or rendered elevation, the platform is freestanding and tied back only where there is something solid to tie to. Board that has been painted every few years looks robust and is frequently only twenty millimetres of softwood over a frame with nothing behind it. Establishing that at survey saves an argument about a dented elevation later.
Post-war housing on the estates off the main road
The village gained a good deal of local authority housing in the nineteen fifties and sixties, and much of it is now privately owned and being extended. These are straightforward roofs and they behave predictably: shallow to medium pitch, concrete interlocking tile, purlin or early trussed structure, and a loft with usable headroom in the middle third.
They take a roof window well. The covering is consistent, the correct flashing kit is readily available for a deep profile tile, and the internal ceiling line is usually flat plasterboard on a modern joist rather than lath and plaster on something unknown. Where a loft conversion is planned, this is the stock where two windows in one slope tends to be achievable without structural drama.
Trussed rafter roofs, and the width they allow
Anything built from about the mid nineteen sixties onwards in the village is likely to have a trussed rafter roof. The webs and the bottom chord are engineered components carrying load in tension and compression, and they are not cut in the way a rafter is cut.
In practice a roof window in a trussed roof is sized to fit between two trusses. At six hundred millimetre centres that caps the structural opening at around five hundred and fifty millimetres wide, so the honest answer to a request for one wide window is usually two narrower ones in adjacent bays. A wider opening is achievable where a structural engineer designs the trimming, which adds a calculation and time to the programme.
Two narrow roof windows side by side deliver more usable daylight in a trussed roof than one compromised wide one.
Bungalows at the village edge, and shallow pitch limits
There are a lot of detached and semi-detached bungalows in and around the village, many of them nineteen sixties and seventies, and a proportion of those have genuinely shallow roofs. Pitch decides the product before anything else does.
Most roof windows want fifteen degrees as a working minimum. Some units are rated from ten degrees with a specified underlay detail and an approved kerb, and below that the manufacturer will not stand behind the weathering. On a twelve degree bungalow roof the sensible route is either a unit rated for that angle on a purpose-made upstand, or a sun tunnel where the requirement is daylight in a hallway rather than a view.
Thatched roofs in the parish, and where the daylight comes from instead
There are thatched cottages in and around Sible Hedingham, and thatch does not take a rooflight. There is no reliable way to terminate a flexible, deep, breathing covering against a rigid frame, and the pitch and the depth of the coat make any attempt at a flashing a permanent weakness.
Daylight in a thatched cottage therefore comes from elsewhere: an eyebrow dormer, which is a thatcher’s job rather than a glazier’s, or from a later rear addition with a tiled or flat roof over it. That later roof is often where the useful work is, because it lights the kitchen at the back where the family actually spends the day, and it sits out of sight of the road.
Barn conversions and cart lodges in the Colne valley
The farmland either side of the village has produced a steady supply of agricultural conversions, and they present a specific daylight problem. A barn has few openings by design, and cutting new ones in the elevations changes the character that the consent was granted to preserve.
Glass in the roof plane is the usual resolution, and on a barn it works well because the roof is large, the internal volume is tall and the light falls a long way into the plan. Where the building is listed or the consent controlled the appearance, the specification is normally a conservation rooflight with a slim black cast frame and a central glazing bar, fitted flush so it sits in the plane of the tiles rather than on top of them.
The conservation area around the church and Swan Street
The historic core of the village around St Peter’s and the older frontages carries conservation area status, and an Article 4 direction can remove permitted development rights in areas of this kind. Where rights are removed, a rooflight that would otherwise be permitted development needs a planning application.
The test applied is the effect on the character and appearance of the area, which in practice means the front slope facing the road is treated very differently from a rear slope hidden behind the ridge. Establishing which slope you are on, and which designations apply, takes a short call to the district and it happens before anything is ordered.
Listed cottages, and the consent that comes before the order
Listed building consent is a separate matter from planning permission and it covers alterations affecting character, inside as well as out. On a listed cottage the roof structure itself is often part of what is listed, which changes the conversation from where the light should go to which timbers can be touched.
None of that is a closed door. Conservation officers deal with rooflights constantly and there are well established solutions. What causes trouble is ordering glass before the consent position is known, because a bespoke unit made to the wrong specification has no second use.
Exposure across open farmland, and driven rain from the west
The village sits in a shallow valley with arable land on three sides and very little to break the wind off the west. Exposure changes the detailing rather than the product.
On an exposed site the upstand height for a flat rooflight is treated as a floor rather than a target, because wind driven rain is pushed further up a vertical face than gravity alone would take it. One hundred and fifty millimetres from the finished roof surface to the top of the kerb is the industry figure, and on a west facing roof with a clear fetch across fields there is no case for cutting it to make a unit sit lower.
Flat roofs added since the nineteen nineties
A high proportion of village properties have gained a single storey rear extension in the last thirty years, and the roof over it is flat, covered in felt, single ply or GRP. These are the roofs that take a flat rooflight or a lantern.
Two things get checked before anything else. The fall, because a designed minimum of 1:80 allows for deflection and construction tolerance and plenty of nineteen nineties decks were laid flatter than that. And the deck itself, because chipboard under a felt roof that has been recovered twice is not a surface to build a kerb on. Where water stands for more than a couple of days after rain, the fall is dealt with first and the glass goes into a roof that drains.
Access on a main road frontage
Many village properties front directly onto a road that carries lorries between Halstead and Haverhill. There is often no footway on one side and the verge is soft.
Where a scaffold has to stand on or over the highway, a licence from Essex County Council is required and it takes time to obtain. Where the work can be reached from the rear garden, and on the deeper plots it usually can, the job is simpler and cheaper. Which of those applies is settled at survey, because it moves the figure noticeably and it changes the earliest possible start date.
Building Control notification in the Braintree district
Sible Hedingham sits in Braintree District, unlike most of the villages further west that fall under Uttlesford. Fitting a new rooflight or replacing an existing unit is notifiable work under the Building Regulations, engaging 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 that notification as part of the job. It matters more than it sounds, because an unnotified alteration surfaces years later during a sale, when a buyer’s solicitor asks for a completion certificate that nobody has. The neighbouring work in Halstead and Braintree goes through the same authority.
What the survey settles on a Sible Hedingham roof
Six things. What the covering actually 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.
Those six turn a range into a fixed written figure. On a village this varied they are worth doing properly, because the roof three doors away is a different roof and the price that suited it will not suit yours. If you want a sensible range before that visit, 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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Near Sible Hedingham
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- Building Control notification handled
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