Skylights & rooflights in Dursley Roofs on the slope below the Cotswold edge

Old roofs, closer to the centre

The middle of Dursley, around the Georgian market house, Long Street and Parsonage Street, has its own designated conservation area, and protected houses stand close by. Stroud District Council handles planning here. Anything listed calls for consent before the roof is touched, and inside the conservation area it is the pitch seen from the street that deserves the first phone call. The planning permission guide covers where permission is needed and what a council will want to see.

Up on the older roofs the choice tends to be a conservation rooflight, a narrow steel-look frame crossed by one glazing bar and bedded low into the slope. A winding handle or a long pole opens several of them. On the yard side, out of view from the street, there is more freedom to fit a plain roof window that opens wide.

The lean-to and the workshop range

A good number of Dursley houses have a low range behind them: a scullery, a former workshop, or a kitchen added in the last century. Their roofs are low and shallow, and the back wall presses against the hill. Overhead glass can rescue a room that has lost its outlook, and an electric opening version lets the kettle and the hob vent from the ceiling instead of onto the walls. Our pages on flat roof rooflights go into the kerb, the glass and how the opening works.

The age of the roof timbers matters more than any drawing. Rafters in a mill-era terrace are rarely where a plan puts them, and the loft side tells you things the street cannot. We look at both, measure between the timbers, and say plainly if two modest units would work better than one large unit. Taking out an entire old rooflight and fitting another goes through Building Control, which the rooflight Building Regulations page walks through.

A cottage can use both approaches. A small conservation unit on the front gives daylight and a view of the street. A larger roof window at the back brings the air. Between them the attic stops being a room that people only go into to fetch the suitcases. Some owners go further and turn the space into a study, because a window you can open is what makes a small sloping room comfortable to work in on a June afternoon, with the dormer-free front left exactly as the street has always seen it.

Bungalows and chalet bungalows

Dursley has its share of bungalows, many extended upwards with a room in the roof. In those rooms the glazing may also be the exit route from an upstairs bedroom in a fire, so clear width and sill height are measured with care. The page on escape routes through a roof window lays out the rules. A full two-storey home with an attic bedroom follows a different rule, which wants a protected stair, so a roof window up there is about daylight and ventilation.

Upstairs bathrooms in a hillside semi benefit from the same thinking. A roof window above the shower, set high enough to clear the spray, releases steam where it gathers. An opening unit helps the room clear after use, though a bathroom that already has an extractor fan should keep using it.

Newer homes and rear extensions

On the newer streets the talking point is the extended back of the house. A flat-topped kitchen under one huge fixed pane is delightful in March and punishing in July. Trading that pane for an opening flat rooflight, or setting a second, opening one next to it, lets the heat out from the highest point and leaves the garden doors alone. In a deep room, a lantern with a vent in its upstand, such as the ones on our roof lantern pages, works in the same way.

How high the unit sits decides how it opens. A bedroom unit you can touch from the bed may well stay manual. Overhead glass at three metres wants a motor, either mains or solar powered and sensing rain, or nobody will open it. Solar spares a finished room any new cable in the plaster. For what shifts the price, see the costs overview, and Cam, just down the valley, has many of the same house types.

There is a quieter benefit on these streets too. Neighbouring roofs sit close on a slope, and an opening window on the back pitch lets you hear the valley and not the road. It also gives the household a way to judge the day by the sky: a bedroom whose window you can tilt at dawn feels different from one that only has a sealed pane, and children, teenagers and anyone who sleeps badly in warm weather tend to notice that quickly.