Skylight Installation in Chadwell St Mary

This is not old housing stock, and that shapes everything. The medieval church at the heart of the village is the exception. Almost all of the homes people actually live in went up after the war, as Chadwell grew from a small place around the church into the estate village it is now. Read a Chadwell roof and you are reading the building methods of the 1950s onwards, not the seventeenth century.

The earlier post-war houses tend to have cut roofs: rafters, purlins and struts built up on site, with a bit of room to work between the timbers. Concrete interlocking tiles are the common covering, laid on shallower pitches than you would find on a Victorian roof, in long consistent terraces and semi-detached runs. Because the estates were built to a pattern, what sits behind the plasterboard on one house is usually close to what sits behind it three doors down. That predictability is a genuine advantage. A survey on one property tells you a lot about its neighbours.

The later stock, from roughly the 1960s and 1970s onwards, is where trussed roofs take over. A trussed roof is prefabricated: a run of factory-made timber frames, each one a web of members held in tension, dropped onto the walls and tiled over. It is quick to build and strong as a whole, but you cannot treat it like a cut roof. The members are doing structural work and cutting one without a designed alternative weakens the whole run. On a trussed Chadwell roof the size and position of a rooflight is often set by where the trusses fall, not by where you would ideally like the glass.

Then there are the flat-roofed rear additions. A great many Chadwell houses have picked up a single-storey kitchen or dining extension across the back garden at some point, and those flat or shallow-mono roofs are almost always the darkest part of the house. They are also, on a south-facing plot, the easiest place to bring in light without touching the main pitched roof at all.

Choosing the frame is quick. Choosing the glass is what determines whether the finished room is pleasant in July, and the number that governs it is the G-value.

Any glazing unit carries two ratings worth knowing. One is the U-value, a measure of heat loss in the depth of winter, quoted in watts per square metre per kelvin; a lower figure is better, and Part L of the Building Regulations sets the floor it has to clear. The other is the G-value, which describes the share of the sun’s heat that passes through, rated between 0 and 1. Ordinary clear double glazing comes in near 0.6, so well over half of the solar energy striking it arrives in the room below. Drop to solar-control double glazing at about 0.3 and you have roughly halved that. On the exposed south slopes here, that single figure separates a room you enjoy in August from one you keep shut behind a blind.

Treat the numbers above as typical rather than exact; they move with the maker and with the size of the unit, so they sketch the choice rather than price it. What holds firm is the reasoning. For a Chadwell slope that faces the sun, solar control is the baseline, not an extra to debate. A smaller opening in 0.3 glass beats a wide one in clear glass that you screen off for nearly half the year. Our guide to energy-efficient skylight installation works through how the figures interact.

Chadwell St Mary is in Thurrock, and that matters for the paperwork. Thurrock is a unitary authority, which means Thurrock Council handles both planning and Building Control itself; it is not covered by Essex County Council the way much of the rest of the patch is. So the authority you deal with here is a different one from the city, and it is worth knowing that from the start.

For most Chadwell homes a rooflight falls under permitted development, and you will not need to apply. The conditions are that it stands no more than 150 millimetres proud of the surrounding roof, keeps below the ridge line, and, on a side elevation below 1.7 metres off the floor, is obscure-glazed with its opening restricted. Ordinary post-war family housing, which is nearly all of the village, generally meets those conditions without difficulty, because it is not the sort of protected stock where the rules close in.

The usual exceptions still apply. Flats and maisonettes never had those rooflight rights in the first place. A listed building needs consent regardless of what the roof is doing. And a home inside a conservation area or covered by an Article 4 Direction loses the automatic right and has to apply. None of that is a reason to assume your house is caught; it is a reason to check. Our advice is always to have Thurrock Council verify how your particular home is classified rather than lean on a guess from us or a neighbour, because only the council holds the authoritative answer, and getting it costs you almost no time.

Planning aside, putting in a new or larger rooflight is something the Building Regulations require to be notified. The thermal side comes under Part L, which is why the unit must reach an accepted U-value, and the safety side comes under Part K, which is why an overhead pane is laminated glass with guarding considered. That notification to Thurrock Council is something we handle for you within the job. There is nothing for you to submit and no process for you to follow up.