Skylights and rooflights in Bampton

Bampton is a small market town that has kept its old street plan. Around Newton Square and the streets running off it, the buildings are a mix of local stone, cob under limewash or render, and some brick fronts added when a house was smartened up in the Georgian and Victorian years. There are inns, shops with living rooms above, and rows of cottages that have been altered many times over the centuries.

The stone is part of the town's story. Limestone has been dug near Bampton for a very long time, and it shows in walls, outbuildings and boundary lines. Houses built of it tend to have thick walls, small deep windows and roofs that were framed to suit the span of the timber available, not to a modern grid.

Because the stock is so mixed, the first thing we ask is simple: which of Bampton's housing eras is yours?

Past the centre, the town widens into twentieth century housing: brick and render semis, bungalows and closes, many with concrete tiles above and plasterboard below, on regular roof structures. Beyond those are the farms and converted barns of the surrounding Exe valley and the first hills towards Exmoor.

Bampton is also a town with a long calendar. It is known for its annual autumn fair, and the streets around the square fill with people and traffic for it. Houses on those streets are lived in all year, and a rooflight job there is planned around when and where materials can be unloaded, not just around the roof.

Because the stock is so mixed, the first thing we ask is simple: which of Bampton's housing eras is yours?

Bampton is not inside a national park, so planning applications go to Mid Devon District Council. The town centre is a conservation area, with a large number of listed buildings among the houses, inns and the church. That does not stop rooflights, but it shapes them.

Most ordinary houses here can take a rooflight without an application, because the general permitted-development limits on size and height apply. The conservation area is where it gets less certain: an Article 4 direction can remove those rights, so find out from the council whether one touches your road, ideally well ahead of settling on a design.

Listed houses are different. External changes need listed building consent, and so can work that alters a historic ceiling or roof timbers. Flats, including those over shops, have no householder permitted development and need an application. Conservation officers tend to favour a rooflight on the back slope with a slim frame, sitting low, and a street-facing slope is where objections usually come from. The rules in full are in the Devon planning and Building Regulations explainer, and conservation rooflights covers the units we use for sensitive roofs.

The product follows the house, the roof and the level of protection. For Bampton, this is how we usually match them.

Old cottage rooms are often small, and a rooflight can make them feel taller.

Old cottage rooms are often small, and a rooflight can make them feel taller. Room height decides how far down the lining runs, so a window above a landing and one above a bedroom bed are specified differently. Where an electric opening unit makes sense, it can be placed high in the slope and still be worked from the floor.

Heating changes the choice too. A cottage with a wood burner downstairs sends warm air up the stairs to the top room, which can become uncomfortable in summer, so a rooflight that opens near the top of the slope helps the house vent itself. A bedroom that is cold in winter may be better served by triple glazing than by a larger pane. We talk through those trade-offs at the survey, with the room in front of us, and write the outcome into the finish schedule.

Glass is chosen for the room: solar control on a west-facing bedroom that overheats in the afternoon, clear high-performance glass on a north-facing landing, and a laminated inner pane on any unit overhead. Every unit goes in to current Building Regulations, heat loss limits under Part L included, and we send the Building Control notification ourselves.

We travel to Bampton from Exeter and survey in the town and the countryside around it. At the visit one of us studies the roof from outside, then measures up inside, finds out what the ceiling is made from and notes whatever will affect the result, whether that is a beam, a crack or an earlier patch of plaster.

The lanes around the old centre can be narrow, some with little room to park a van, and farm tracks can be steep and rough. So access is part of the survey: where materials will be set down, what kind of scaffold or tower suits the plot, and whether a licence from Devon County Council is required for scaffolding on a public road. On a listed or conservation job we also gather what is needed to support the application to Mid Devon District Council.

The written quote that follows carries the finish schedule and is agreed before work begins. If the weather turns while the roof is open, the opening is sheeted and sealed at the end of each day. Dust is controlled throughout, the room is handed back clean, and the job comes with our ten-year workmanship guarantee. We work in Tiverton, just to the south, and in Dulverton, over the border on Exmoor. Bampton cottages and barns are rarely alike, so a short visit beats a guess: send the quote form with a photo of the roof, or email info@brightviewskylightsexeter.co.uk to agree a day. The rest of the service is on the homepage, and the areas page shows where else we work.