Rooflights and skylights in Shoreham-by-Sea, from the station to the shingle

Shoreham-by-Sea sits in Adur District, between the South Downs to the north, the River Adur and a long shingle spit on the sea side. That mix of water, chalk and railway line shapes every roof in town, and it shapes the glass we would put in it.

If you are weighing a rooflight installation in Shoreham-by-Sea, this page is about the town itself: what its streets are made of, who decides what can be done to a roof, and what a room under a skylight is likely to hear. The town is 26.7 road miles from Crawley, well inside the 30 miles we cover, and we travel to survey every room before we quote.

The 2011 Census counted 20,547 residents. That is a small town with an unusually layered past, and the layers matter for a simple reason. A roof is the part of a house that changes least visibly and ages most quietly, so the age of the street tells you a good deal about what you will find when the roof is opened up. We start there, with the street, and we finish with the glass.

The railway reached Shoreham in 1840, and it drove the town's Victorian development. The station sits on the West Coastway Line, and the streets that grew up around it carry the look of that period.

Victorian terraces and villas are good candidates for loft conversions, because the roof space above a two-storey house of that age is usually generous. They are also houses where the existing roof has had well over a century to settle. Slopes sag a little. Ridges are rarely dead straight. A roof window has to be fitted to the roof as it is, with flashings dressed to the covering already there, and not to a roof as it should be.

When a street has a run of matching houses, there is a second consideration, which is how the front slope looks from the road. A rooflight on a rear slope changes little from the street. On a front slope it is visible to neighbours and to anyone walking past, and in a conservation area it is exactly the kind of change that gets looked at. We come to that below. For now the practical advice is to think about the rear slope first, because it is usually the easier place for a rooflight and often the better one for light.

Adur & Worthing Councils run planning for Adur, with West Sussex County Council as the county authority. For a rooflight, the council's planning pages are where the position on your address is confirmed, and we point you to them rather than guess.

Adur has seven conservation areas: Kingston Buci, North Lancing, Old Shoreham, Shoreham-by-Sea, Sompting, Southlands and Southwick. Three of them have character appraisals and management strategies. Four do not.

Shoreham Airport, now known as Brighton City Airport, is the oldest licensed airport still operating in the UK. It has been privately owned from 2006.

It is worth mentioning because a rooflight buyer near an airfield will reasonably wonder about aircraft. We have no sourced flight data for this field to put on the page, and we will not invent any. How much of it a given room hears depends on where the house is, which way the roof faces and what the room is used for.

That is a survey question, and we treat it as one. If you can hear aircraft from the bedroom you want to convert, tell us, and we will listen for ourselves at the time of the visit and write down what we find. If you cannot, the spec does not have to be built around it. The aim is always the same: the glazing chosen for the noise the room actually has, rather than a generic package.

A survey in Shoreham-by-Sea starts from the same four questions wherever the house is. What is overhead, in the roof space? What does the room hear? What does the council say about the address? And where does the light want to come from?

Those four answers decide everything else. The roof space tells us about the rafters or joists, the insulation and the position of any chimney or services. The listening tells us what the glass has to cope with. The planning check tells us whether the roof falls inside a conservation area and whether an extra step applies. The room tells us where the light is wanted and how big the opening should be.

The spec that follows is one page. It names the room and the sounds we heard. It names the glazing build we propose and the reasoning behind it. It names the seals and the upstand, and how they are finished. You can read it, question it and compare it with anything else you have been quoted. It comes with every quote, and it is the thing we are accountable to when the work is done.

These are the questions a Shoreham householder is likely to be asking, answered plainly.