Rooflights and skylights in Cranleigh

Cranleigh lies in the Borough of Waverley, so planning questions about your roof go to Waverley Borough Council. Surrey County Council is the county authority above it.

That is worth knowing before a quote, because the council that judges your roof is neither ours nor Crawley's. Cranleigh is 20.7 road miles from Crawley, well inside the thirty miles we cover, and the rules that apply are Waverley's.

A rooflight set close to the plane of an existing slope is often a Building Regulations matter rather than a planning one. A new opening on a front slope, or on a house whose permitted development rights have been taken away, can be different. Whether either applies is checked for the address with the council before the quote is final. It is never guessed from a postcode.

The appraisal describes the local look in three materials. There is reddish-brown brickwork made from the Wealden clay, tile hanging on upper walls, and plain clay tile roofs, often by Swallow, a local tile maker. Slate appears on the shallower pitches.

A rooflight installer reads a roof in that order. The covering decides the flashing kit and how the edge of the opening is finished, so the survey looks at it before anything is ordered.

The Horsham to Guildford railway opened in 1865. Cranleigh station became the busiest on the line, and the line closed in 1965.

For a rooflight, that is an honest piece of good news. There is no passenger line running through the village today for the glazing to be specified against. A house here does not need a glazing build chosen for passing trains, and the research names no motorway or flight path for Cranleigh either. So we do not reach for aircraft, or for trains that no longer run.

What remains is ordinary weather and ordinary village sound. A rooflight is the thinnest part of a roof, and thin glass passes sound more readily than a tiled slope does. In a quiet village the loudest thing in a loft bedroom is often rain on the glass, and that depends on the build of the glazing, not on where the house stands.

The soils under Cranleigh are Gault Clay and Upper Greensand, and Winterfold Forest lies on the Greensand Ridge in the north-east. Clay is where the bricks and tiles come from, which is why so many of the village's walls and roofs share a colour.

That is a geography fact, and it is useful in one practical way. A Wealden village with clay-country materials and a forested ridge close by is a place where roofs carry moss, leaf fall and weather, and where older coverings have weathered to a colour a new flashing has to sit beside. We choose the finish of the new flashing and the frame so it settles into the roof and does not stand out from it.

It is also a reminder that Cranleigh is not a place for a single formula. The village has a protected centre, a wider parish around it, and a setting that runs from clay lowland to a greensand ridge. A survey of one house tells us about that house. It does not tell us about the road next to it, so every quote begins with a visit.

Every quote comes with a one-page written quiet spec for the room. It records what we heard at the survey, the glazing build we propose and why, and how the upstand and seals are finished.

For a two-storey house under plain clay tile, with a loft bedroom at the back, the spec would set out the room first. It would note that there is no railway or flight path named for the village, so the noise to plan for is rain on the glass and the normal sounds of a village road. It would then name a laminated acoustic inner pane, a thicker outer pane and a deep cavity, and describe a flashing kit cut to the tile and a lined, trimmed opening.