Skylights and rooflights in Markfield

Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council is the planning authority. A house rooflight normally goes in without an application, because Class C of the 2015 order allows it. Two numbers matter: 150mm, the furthest the glass may stand off the slope, and 1.7m, the height above the floor that the opening part of a side-slope unit must pass if it is to open at all. Either way a side-slope unit is obscure-glazed. The third rule is simple: nothing may rise above the roof's top.

The register lists two conservation records with the village name. The closer sits about 190 metres from the centre point and takes in four listed buildings, one graded II* and three II. The second, some 410 metres away, has none recorded. Neither carries a date in the data, so we offer none. For the closer one, the borough published an overview in 2012, and we read it when a job sits near the boundary.

A second track runs beside planning: Building Regulations. Opening a roof counts as building work whether or not planning comes into it. When notice is required, we send it, to the local authority or to a private approver on the register. All the statutory detail is in our planning and Building Regulations guide.

Should an application be needed, it is light work for something this small: a sketch of the slope with the unit drawn on, the product's size and frame depth, and a photo of the roof today. We note all three at the survey. Where no application is needed, a date can be booked.

Where the register shows a listing next door, the survey notes it. A neighbour's listing does not bind your roof, but it hints at how closely the council may look, and the flush, modest-framed rooflight is the easiest to defend whichever way that goes.

Markfield has a long link with quarrying, and it even lends its name to a rock: Markfieldite, a very hard microdiorite found locally and used in roadstone and railway construction. Hill Hole, the highest point in the village, is a quarried granite outcrop with views across the Midland Plain, as far as the Clent Hills and south towards the Cotswolds. None of that tells us how your roof is built. A hard-stone village still has timber roofs, and the age and framing of each one is something we read from inside the loft rather than guess from the postcode.

What we look for first is the width between rafters, because that sets the largest roof window that fits without cutting a structural timber. After that comes the headroom under the ridge: a window is only worth having if someone can stand or sit where the light lands. Boarded storage lofts, which are common enough in family houses, are usually the easiest starting point because access is already there, though a habitable floor usually needs stronger joists.

Ceiling height matters more than people expect. In a steep loft a window high on the slope throws light across the floor and shows sky; in a shallow roof the same window sits low and looks at the garden. Both positions get sketched at the survey, and you choose, because the room could be a bedroom, an office or a spot for the sewing machine.

Reading a loft in ten minutes

The survey on a Markfield loft runs in a set order. We find the ridge, count the rafters across the slope, check whether a purlin (the long timber that carries the middle of the rafters) crosses the planned position, and look at the felt and battens underneath for the state of the roof. Then we go outside and match what we saw inside to what is on the slope, because a rooflight has to line up with a gap that exists on both sides of the tiles.

Granite has one more effect on a survey: a village with a stone trade has seen plenty of building and rebuilding, so the roof you own may carry the marks of several owners. Lead flashings from one decade, a patched ridge from another, a skylight from a third. We photograph each slope as we find it, and the quote describes the roof we saw, so that the work lands on what is really there and not on a tidy guess.

When a unit is exchanged rather than added, the upgrade figures for existing homes apply. A roof window: 1.4 in W/m²K terms, or Window Energy Rating band B. A rooflight: 2.2. An energy efficient rooflight from us reaches both. And a loft conversion in a two-storey house cannot lean on its roof window as the way out. Fire rules count escape windows only to 4.5m, measured up from the ground, so the protected stair carries that duty.

Markfield is a large village inside both the National Forest and Charnwood Forest, within Hinckley and Bosworth, south-east of Junction 22 of the M1 and south of the A50. That road is the nearest classified one to the centre. Nothing recorded within two kilometres is a railway station, so equipment comes by van from Leicester, 7.8 road miles and about 16 minutes away.

The green around the village is part of the appeal and part of the brief. To the north-west of the village lies the Hill Hole Nature Reserve, almost beside it the Altar Stones and Blacksmith's Field reserve, and Markfield Hill stands about half a kilometre out. A house with trees in sight is a house that wants a rooflight angled to catch the canopy and the sky above it, not just a patch of ceiling. Where a back extension faces the green, a flat roof rooflight over the dining end often does more for the room than a new window in the wall.

Quarrying has not left the parish. The former headquarters of Aggregate Industries, now under Holcim, was in Markfield, and the Bardon Hill Quarry is expanding into the parish to extend its life by around 40 years. Heavy industry nearby is a reason to think about glass. A rooflight that gets dusty or streaked on the outside is easier to live with if the pane is self-cleaning or sits at a pitch where rain does some of the work, and we will say so when we measure.

The jobs change from week to week: a lantern over an extension, then a small unit over a bathroom. The method stays put. Structure first, then what the register says about the address, then an opening sized to suit the roof. A rooflight is only ever as good as its hole.

The record names the Queens Head and the Bulls Head, and notes that the George was once the Boot. They are good landmarks for finding a street but nothing to do with a roof, so we leave them there. What matters for the survey is the access: a scaffold tower on a narrow lane needs a parking plan, and we agree that with you beforehand.

Neighbouring Ratby, Groby and Desford are close enough that a morning in one and an afternoon in another is a sensible day, and the chips below link to each page. The village you live in sets the planning record, but the shape of the problem is usually the same: a room with too little daylight, a roof with a handful of workable positions, and a choice between them that is best made standing in the room with a tape measure.