Where skylights and rooflights fit among Standish's church-side cottages

Standish was a settlement long before it was a suburb. The parish church, the market place and the lanes around them hold the oldest buildings: cottages and houses in brick and stone, with low eaves and thick walls, many of them re-roofed several times since they were built. Standish later sat in the coalfield that surrounded Wigan, and the colliery years brought rows of terraced housing, built to hold the families of the people who dug the coal.

Those terraces line the roads running towards Wigan, in small brick houses with slate roofs and a pair of chimneys on each pair of homes. Their layout is simple and their loft space is limited, because the pitch is moderate and the rafters are closely spaced. Inter-war semis came next, along the edges of the older roads, with hipped tile roofs and a rear garden. From the middle of the twentieth century onward, large private estates spread north, east and west of the centre, towards the motorway and out to the fields.

The newest of those estates are the biggest part of the page. They are detached and semi-detached houses with concrete tile roofs, shallow lofts built with roof trusses rather than separate rafters, and many have an en-suite, a stairwell or an integral garage under part of the roof. Trusses matter to a rooflight, because the timbers in them are structural and cannot be cut the way a rafter can, so the position of a frame depends on the truss spacing.

Standish also covers the edges towards Shevington, Coppull and Wrightington. The housing there thins out into farm properties, bungalows and large individual houses, and many have been extended or converted for use as a home office or a self-contained annexe. The same surveys and the same tidy finishing apply on all of them.

Standish lies in the Wigan borough, so planning is decided by Wigan Council, which also runs a building control service. The village is part of Greater Manchester, and the borough's own rules are the ones that apply. On an ordinary house with a pitched roof, permitted development usually covers a rooflight; the conditions sit in the guide to when a skylight needs consent, so they are not repeated here. We check them on your roof at the survey.

The oldest part of Standish is the place to look carefully. The church, the market place and the older houses around them make an area where a council is likely to take particular interest in what is seen from the street, and some of the buildings are listed. Conservation areas and any Article 4 directions are listed on the council's website, wigan.gov.uk, so check your own address there. Permitted development for a rooflight survives inside a conservation area on its own, though an Article 4 direction can take it away. For listed buildings, listed building consent is required, and Historic England explains the process. What councils tend to expect is described under protected-area rooflights, and the road-facing slope is dealt with under a roof window above the street.

Wigan Council's building control is told of every Standish job by us, and the energy and safety checks on a new rooflight are explained separately.

Standish has a mix of owner-occupied houses and a few converted properties, and the first question is always whether the building is a house. A flat, or a house divided into flats, loses the permitted development that a single dwelling has, so a rooflight there goes through a planning application. The terraces along the Wigan road are mostly single houses, while some larger villas near the centre have been split, and the deeds or the council can settle it quickly. Our survey notes what we see, but the council has the final word.

Loft rooms add one more question. Where a two-storey house gets a bedroom in the roof, escape depends on a protected stair, which no roof window can replace. A bungalow is different: its roof window can be the escape route when the openable area and sill height meet Approved Document B, and climbing out through the roof sets out how.