Rooflights and skylights in Ashington, beside the A24

Ashington is a village and civil parish in the Horsham district of West Sussex. It sits on the A24 about 3 miles north-east of Storrington, and its postcode district is RH20, with Pulborough as the post town.

The 2011 census counted 2,526 people across the parish. That is a small place, and the scale matters for anyone planning roof glazing. There is no town centre to manage, no dense terrace where every rooflight is seen by forty neighbours, and no single dominant building type. There is a village, a main road to its east, and a good deal of ordinary family housing in between.

Horsham's planning framework classes Ashington as a Medium Village, and the settlement lies west of the A24. The village is also on Metrobus route 23, which links Worthing, Horsham and Crawley. We work from Crawley, and Ashington is 19.7 road miles from us, so a survey is a planned visit with the tape, the ladder and the right questions already prepared. If you would like to compare it with a neighbour, our page for Storrington covers the village just to the south-west.

The local planning authority is Horsham District Council, working with West Sussex County Council. The made Ashington Neighbourhood Plan, adopted on 23 June 2021, is part of Horsham's development plan, so it sits alongside the district policies when the council looks at a proposal in the village.

For most rooflights the plan is not the question. A roof window or skylight in an ordinary house generally falls within permitted development, with limits on how far the unit stands proud of the roof plane and on whether the slope faces a highway. Those limits change for flats, for listed buildings and where an Article 4 direction or a conservation area applies. Our guide to planning permission for rooflights and skylights sets out the general tests.

For any particular address, the position is checked for that address. We do not assert a conservation or listing status for a house from a map or from memory. We check the council's own records, tell you what they say, and only then draw the opening.

A house from the last few decades has a roof built to rules that did not exist for older buildings. That helps a rooflight in several ways, and it is worth setting out plainly.

Most modern pitched roofs are framed with engineered trusses rather than individually cut rafters. A truss is a triangulated frame made up at a factory and set at regular spacing, often at 600 mm centres. The members are designed to carry load in particular places, which means an opening cannot be cut through them without thought. A roof window is usually sized to sit between two trusses, and where a wider opening is wanted, the trusses either side are trimmed and supported with new timbers, to a design that is checked. Our guide to sizing a rooflight for the room shows how the frame spacing and the room's floor area work together.

A modern roof will also usually have a breathable membrane beneath the tiles or slates. That membrane is a second line of defence, and the flashing kit for a roof window is laid to it, so the detail at the opening is tidier and more predictable than on an old roof with bare battens.

Ashington is growing again. The neighbourhood plan allocates about 225 dwellings on three sites, under policies ASH10, ASH11 and ASH12, including Chanctonbury Nursery and Land West of Ashington School. A further 74 homes have been approved in the village by Horsham District Council.

A new house is delivered with a roof that is sound and finished, but it is rarely the roof its owner wants for ever. Two things tend to follow a first few years in a new home. One is a loft conversion, where the trusses are altered and a bedroom or office is formed in the space. The other is a rear extension, usually with a flat roof or a lantern. Both are places for glazing, and both benefit from being thought through before the work begins.

We do not build homes. We fit and replace rooflights and skylights. If you are in a newer house and thinking ahead to a conversion, the order matters. The position of the unit is easiest to settle while the roof is still plain, and the quiet spec, our written note for the room, can be drawn up at the same time as the opening. Ask for it at the survey.

Not every job here is a new opening. Some houses already have a rooflight, and it has reached the stage where it needs replacing. The signs are plain: a misted unit, with condensation trapped between the panes, is one. A frame that has stopped closing tight is another. A rooflight that has gone dim, or that lets in draughts on a still day, is a third.

When a unit is replaced, there are two choices. You can fit a like-for-like unit in the same opening, which is quicker and keeps the roof undisturbed. Or you can fit a better unit, with a different glazing build, in the same opening or in an enlarged one. For a room that hears the A24, the second route is usually worth a look, because the old unit was probably chosen for daylight and not for sound.

Our page on misted and failed rooflight replacement covers the process, and the survey settles which route suits the room. When a unit comes out, the opening is checked for damp, the kerb or flashing is renewed, and the new unit is fitted to current Building Regulations.