Matching a skylight or rooflight to houses facing the Dee marshes at Parkgate

Parkgate began as a landing place. Ships once called here on the Dee, in the eighteenth century, and the tall, narrow houses lining the water were built for the passengers and traders who came ashore. The river has since pulled away behind a wide belt of saltmarsh, but the buildings stayed, and the Parade still runs along the old edge of the shore. Many of the fronts are rendered or painted brick, three storeys under a pitched roof, with deep plans that stretch back from the water.

Those houses are the heart of what we fit here, and they bring a particular kind of room: a second or third floor lit from one end, a stair that turns twice, and attics tucked under a slate or tile slope. Behind the frontage, lanes and short streets hold smaller cottages and Victorian terraces. Their roofs are lower, their eaves are close to the ground, and the loft is often the one part of the house nobody has yet claimed.

Away from the shore the town thins into the twentieth century. Detached houses, semis and a good many bungalows climb the gentle rise towards Neston, and Parkgate runs into Neston so closely that the border between them means little when you are looking up at a roof. Here the coverings are concrete tile or machine clay, the roof pitch is shallower, and extensions have been added over the years in whatever material was cheapest that decade.

A rooflight in the old part is chosen for how it looks from the Parade and how it sits on a roof that may not be square. A rooflight in the newer streets is chosen for the structure beneath it and for the room it lights. Both are surveyed first and fitted by our own team.

Chimney stacks add a further constraint on the waterfront terraces, because the stack at each party wall narrows the clear span of rafter that a window can use. The painted render and colour-washed brick of the fronts also means a rooflight at the back is judged against a skyline seen from the marsh path, where a bright white frame stands out and a dark slim one disappears into the slate. Extensions tell the same story in miniature. A glazed garden room on a Victorian cottage, a kitchen pushed out into a side return and a loft room added in the 1980s each leave a roof with its own joists, its own fall and its own gaps for daylight to get in.

Parkgate falls under Cheshire West and Chester Council for planning, and the strip along the shore sits inside the Parkgate Conservation Area, so check with the council before planning anything on the front slope of an old house. Conservation area status does not, on its own, remove the usual rights for fitting a rooflight. The council can still add restrictions through an Article 4 direction, and a listed building needs listed building consent whatever else is true.

Whether a given house is listed is a question about that address, and we would not guess it from the street. The Parade has older buildings, some of them listed, and the council's records show which. The Historic England list is public too. The permitted development rules are explained in when a skylight needs no application, and an old slope in a protected area raises its own questions, taken up in what to ask the council about a protected roof. For a slope facing the street, see roof windows at the front of the house.

On every job we notify Cheshire West and Chester Council's building control ourselves, and the standards our glazing is chosen to meet are explained in a separate guide.

If you live in a flat or maisonette, the permitted development rights do not apply in the same way, and you will want to speak to the freeholder as well. If you are unsure how any of this applies to your address, send us the postcode and a photograph and we will help you find the right route before you commit to a survey.