Rooflights and skylights in Billingshurst, from the High Street to the new streets

Billingshurst sits in Horsham District, about 6 miles south-west of Horsham, in the Weald. It is a place defined by two roads and a railway, and all three shape how a roof is used and how it sounds.

The A29 runs through the village. It follows the line of the Roman Stane Street, and it crosses the A272 in the middle of the built-up area. The station is on the Arun Valley Line. So the village has a crossing where two main roads meet, a railway a short walk from the centre, and the quiet fields of the Weald beyond. That mix of busy and rural is what most rooms here live with.

The village has also grown. The 2021 census recorded 9,127 residents, against 8,232 at the 2011 count. Nearly a thousand more people in ten years means new streets, new extensions and new lofts, and each of those is a place where a roof gets opened for light. We are based 16.1 road miles away in Crawley, so a survey here is a planned visit. We arrive with the tape, the ladder and the questions already prepared.

The High Street shows Billingshurst's history in a single run of buildings. The design statement describes a mix of medieval, Victorian and Edwardian buildings, with tile-hung elevations, painted brickwork and horizontal clapboarding.

That variety matters to anyone thinking about a rooflight, because the street is read as a whole. Tile hanging on an upper storey, painted brick below and clapboard to the side each give a different background to a new piece of glass. A rooflight on a rear slope, out of sight from the street, is judged differently from one on a front slope facing the pavement. Where the roof can be seen, the frame colour and the depth of the unit matter more. A dark grey frame sits quietly in a clay roof, and a slim profile raises fewer questions than a raised dome.

Victorian and Edwardian buildings tend to have steeper pitches and tall, narrow roof spaces. These are the lofts that get converted to bedrooms or studies, and a roof window is the natural way to bring daylight into them. A medieval building is a different case, with low eaves, deep timbers and roof spaces shaped by the frame. There the question is how much of the structure can be left alone, and often the answer is a single small unit positioned between existing timbers.

Noise is where our approach differs from a standard installation, and Billingshurst gives it three real sources. Aircraft are not part of the picture here. What the village does have is a road junction, a railway and the English weather.

The first is the crossing of the A29 and the A272. A junction like that brings the sound of vehicles slowing, waiting and pulling away, and that sound carries to the rooms nearest the road. A loft bedroom in a house close to the crossing hears it through the roof, because the roof is the thinnest part of the building. Our guide to keeping road and rail noise out through a rooflight sets out what helps.

The second is the railway. The station is on the Arun Valley Line, and a room close to the line hears trains pass, most of all on a still night. A thin single-glazed or tired double-glazed unit carries that sound easily. A laminated acoustic inner pane, panes of unequal thickness and continuous seals all reduce it, and we describe that build in writing instead of making a promise in numbers.

The right product depends on the roof and the room together. The table sets the roofs found in the village against the units that usually suit them.

Most questions come down to three things: what the roof is, what the council says and what the room will sound like. These are the ones that come up most naturally for a village like this.