Rooflights and skylights in Kingston upon Thames

Kingston is a London borough, so the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames is the planning authority and no county council sits above it. The town is 30 road miles from Crawley, at the far edge of the area we cover, and its paperwork belongs to a different world from West Sussex.

That matters on the first visit. The Royal Borough publishes its own conservation area material, keeps its own list of protected streets and decides its own applications. A skylight or rooflight that would be a routine opening on a 1960s house in one town can need a closer look in another. For that reason we treat the planning position as something to be checked for the address, not assumed from the postcode.

Our general guide to planning permission for rooflights and skylights sets out the usual questions. The Royal Borough's own conservation pages are the place to see which streets are covered on the kingston.gov.uk website. Where the work is notifiable under the Building Regulations, we handle the Building Control notification, and we install to current Building Regulations whatever the planning answer turns out to be.

Kingston became a trading centre once its bridge was built in the late twelfth century. The medieval street layout around All Saints Church and Market Place is described by the Royal Borough as the best preserved of its type in outer London.

Kingston Old Town Conservation Area was designated in March 1971. It covers 334 properties across 13.4 hectares, which is small enough that each roof is part of a visible whole. All Saints Church is Grade I listed, and both Kingston Bridge and Market House are Grade II*. Around them sit Georgian buildings such as 3 and 5 Church Street and 3 Market Place, Victorian ones such as Market House and 40 High Street, and Neo-Tudor development from the early twentieth century.

The materials are consistent. Red and yellow brick laid in Flemish bond dominates, alongside painted render, stucco and hanging clay tiles. Natural red clay tiles dominate the roofscape. That last point is the one a rooflight installer cares about, because a rooflight in this setting is seen against a field of red clay.

Grove Crescent was laid out around 1863, at the same time as Kingston Railway Station opened. The two belong together: a planned crescent of houses built for people who would use the new railway.

That gives the area a period identity, and it gives the roofs a period idea of what a loft was for. A Victorian house of that age was designed with box rooms and attic space under the slope. Converting that space to a bedroom or study is common sense, and a rooflight is how it gets daylight.

A house so close to a railway line carries a second question. Trains are regular, and a loft room sits high, with only tile, timber and glass between the bed and the noise. The rooflight becomes the weakest acoustic point in the roof, and a plain double-glazed unit will let the sound of the line through more readily than the plastered slope around it.

Noise does not come only from outside the house. Rain on flat glass makes its own sound, and a lantern over a kitchen or family room can drum loudly in a downpour.

A rear extension with a flat roof is where many rooflights and roof lanterns go in a town of older houses, because a deep original plan leaves the back rooms short of light. The glass sits almost level, so each drop lands squarely on it. Thin outer glazing or polycarbonate makes that loud, and a hard room finish with no soft furnishings carries the sound further.

The quiet version starts with the outer pane. A thicker outer layer, bonded to a laminated inner one, and sealed with a cavity between, breaks the impact before it reaches the room. The upstand, the kerb the unit sits on, is lined and insulated so it does not ring. Our guide to how to reduce rain noise under a flat rooflight goes through the options, and roof lantern installation explains how a lantern is built up.

A job here follows a short sequence, and each step is written down.