Rooflights and skylights in Corby

From Old Village limestone cottages to steelworks terraces and New Town estates, we plan every rooflight and skylight around the view from where you actually sit.

Book a home visit See the view from here

From Peterborough: About 27 miles by road
Planning: North Northamptonshire Council
County: Northamptonshire

Corby's stone, steel and New Town roofs hide the sky differently

A frame line over an Old Village bed

In a low limestone cottage bedroom near the High Street, a wide frame edge can sit exactly where the sky should open above the pillow.
A bar across a steelworks terrace sofa

Narrow terraced roofs built for Bessemer Grove's steelworkers often take a rooflight with a central bar right where a sofa's sightline meets the sky.
A deep reveal in a stone-walled kitchen

Coursed limestone walls around the Old Village run thick enough that a square reveal can turn a kitchen window's sky into a narrow slot.
Misted glass on a New Town extension

A flat rooflight over a New Town kitchen extension sits low and nearly level, so ageing seals mist and dirt settles on the pane rather than washing off.

Three roof ages, one Corby sky

Holford's 1951 masterplan set Corby's New Town estates among substantial open space and woodland, so many of those roofs look out over trees and green ground rather than more rooftops. The Old Village, rural until the 1930s transformed the town beyond it, keeps a tighter, older grain around the High Street. What a rooflight actually shows from a bed or a sofa depends on which of these two grains the house sits in.

The sky over an Old Village pillow
Sky past a steelworks terrace sofa
Sky above a New Town kitchen sink

What we install and replace in Corby

A Danish name, and a roofline built in three different centuries

Corby's name comes from a Danish settlement recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, "Kori's by", and for a long stretch after that the place stayed a small rural village around what is now the Old Village. Steel changed all of that inside a single decade. Stewarts & Lloyds began building an integrated ironstone and steel works from 1933, and once production started in October 1935 the village of around 1,500 people grew to roughly 12,000 within a few years. A New Town designation followed in 1950, and architect William Holford's masterplan laid out estates on a car-oriented plan with substantial open space and woodland running through them. The population had passed 47,000 by 1971.

That history left Corby with a roofline that reads as three separate towns rather than one. The Old Village keeps its older, stone-built grain. The streets raised for steelworkers in the 1930s follow a tighter, more standard pattern. The New Town estates, and the newer developments that have followed at Oakley Vale and Prior's Hall, are a third generation again. A rooflight or skylight planned for any one of them has to start from the actual roof in front of it, not from an assumption about "a Corby house".

That is why every quote here starts with a sightline sketch rather than a product choice: a drawing of the sky you would actually see from the bed, the sofa or the sink in the room the glass is going into, whichever of Corby's three roof generations that room happens to sit under.

Coursed limestone and Collyweston slate around the Old Village

The oldest roofs in Corby sit on the High Street in the Old Village, and several are listed in their own right. Nos. 79 and 81 High Street are early 19th-century houses of regular coursed limestone under Collyweston slate roofs, and No. 57 High Street, mid-18th century, is squared coursed limestone with an ashlar front, a part brick rear wall and a roof of stone slate and Welsh slate. Nos. 75 and 77 carry a datestone of 1609 and were originally roofed in thatch, built of the same regular coursed limestone as their neighbours.

Coursed limestone walls of that age are thick, and a thick wall means a deep window reveal almost by default: the glass sits at the outer face while the stone continues in behind it, so a square-cut opening can narrow the sky to something closer to a letterbox than a clear view, seen from a bed or a chair set back from the window. Splaying that reveal, angling the top and sides out towards the room, opens the same hole in the roof into a wider slice of sky without changing the size of the frame. Our reveal shape guide sets out when that splay earns its keep.

Collyweston stone slate is laid in diminishing courses, thick near the eaves and thinner as it climbs to the ridge, and a flashing kit made for a thin fired tile simply will not sit flush against it. Getting that junction right means dressing the flashing to the stone's own thickness rather than dropping in a standard kit and hoping. A flush, low-profile unit built for stone and slate roofs is what keeps that detail workable; the conservation rooflight installation page shows how those units are built.

The Old Village Conservation Area, and eleven listed buildings close by

The Old Village carries its own conservation area designation, separate from the wider 20th-century town around it, protecting the character of what stayed a rural village until the steel years began. North Northamptonshire Council's own appraisal for the area is dated March 2007, and the boundary contains eleven listed buildings: one Grade II* and ten Grade II. A rooflight going into a roof on the High Street itself, or close to it, is very often a rooflight going in near one of those listed buildings, even where the house being worked on is not listed.

North Northamptonshire Council became the unitary planning authority for the whole borough in April 2021, replacing the former Corby Borough Council alongside three other district councils. It carries the conservation duty for the Old Village and the consent process for anything listed within it.

A rooflight going onto one of the listed houses on the High Street needs listed building consent before anything else, granted by North Northamptonshire Council alongside any other permission the job requires. A neighbouring roof that is not itself listed but still sits inside the Old Village boundary has lost some of its permitted development rights for roof alterations, so that too gets checked against the address rather than assumed from the street. Step outside the conservation area boundary, into the steelworks terraces or one of the New Town estates, and permitted development more often covers the job, though the specific address still gets checked before anything is ordered. None of that changes what Building Control asks for: the glazing, the structural opening and the escape route from the room all have to meet current Building Regulations, whatever the planning position turns out to be. We submit the notification ourselves where the work needs one.

Bessemer Grove and the terraces steel built almost overnight

Bessemer Grove was the first new street built for the steelworks, laid out around the time the rebuilt blast furnace was lit in the mid-1930s, and it set the pattern for the streets that followed it. A large share of that first wave of workers came from Scotland, drawn by the steelworks' expansion through the 1930s and again after the war, which earned the town its old nickname of "Little Scotland". The terraces built for them, and the further streets built as the town kept growing towards its 1971 population past 47,000, form Corby's second roof generation: a tighter, more repeated pattern than the Old Village, built to the standards of their own decade rather than a modern one.

A rooflight or roof window going into a roof of this generation is usually going into a narrower, more standard rafter spacing than a stone cottage, and often a plainer covering, tile or slate rather than stone. That generally makes for a shallower reveal than the Old Village gives, since the wall is not carrying the same depth of stone, but it brings its own question: how a frame and any glazing bar sit in a smaller roof opening, seen at an angle from a bed under a steep pitch rather than looked straight up through. Our roof window installation page covers pitched roofs of this kind, and our frame profiles and sightlines guide explains why a bar reads more heavily on a steep pitch, where the eye meets the glass at an angle, than it would through a flat ceiling looked straight up through.

The steelworks itself closed in 1980, ending the industry that had built these streets in the first place, but the terraces remain the everyday housing stock across a large part of the town, a roof generation of its own between the Old Village stone and the New Town estates that came after it.

Holford's New Town streets, and the estates that followed

Corby's New Town designation in 1950 brought architect William Holford's masterplan, drawn up from 1951, for a car-oriented layout with substantial open space and woodland running between the housing rather than terrace after terrace. Holford's team laid out the first 500 houses under that plan, and the large council estates built through the 1950s and 1960s followed the same basic approach: roads and blocks of housing set within green space rather than packed tight to the street, in contrast to the steelworks terraces raised a generation earlier.

That pattern of building has continued well beyond the original New Town era. Oakley Vale and Prior's Hall are both large, more recent estates continuing the scale of house-building Corby has seen from the 1930s onward, and Danesholme, the town's southernmost estate, takes its own name from a Danish settlement once on that ground, an echo of the town's own Domesday-era name.

A roof from this generation, whether a 1950s council house or a newer estate home, tends to sit within a repeated pattern across a whole street or phase, roof to roof, rather than the one-off shapes of the Old Village. That repetition is worth checking on survey rather than assuming: where a loft has already been altered, by an earlier conversion or an extension, the roof in front of us may not match the standard pattern the rest of the street was built to.

Reading the roof before naming the glass

Whichever of Corby's three roof generations a job sits in, the same question decides it: from the exact spot in the room where you actually sit, stand or lie, how much sky will the glass show you, and where will the frame edge and any glazing bar fall against it. That is the question a sightline sketch answers, drawn from the bed, the sofa, the desk or the sink the room is used from, before a unit is specified.

A wide outer frame, or a bar set dead centre across a narrow opening, can sit exactly where the open sky should be from a low viewpoint like a bed or a sofa. A slimmer profile, or a position that moves the bar out of that direct sightline, keeps more of the sky whole, whether the room is a New Town estate bedroom or an Old Village one above a low reveal.

Reveal depth matters just as much, and it is driven by the wall the glass sits in rather than the glass itself: a thick stone wall in the Old Village gives a naturally deeper reveal than a modern cavity wall on a New Town estate, and a square-cut opening in either case narrows the sky more than a splayed one does. We measure the wall, the ceiling depth and the eye position on survey, and draw the answer into the sketch rather than guessing at it from the roof type alone.

Keeping the sky clear over stone, brick and modern tile alike

A rooflight only keeps the view it was installed for as long as the glass itself stays clear, and that comes down to specification rather than luck. A warm-edge spacer bar around the perimeter of the pane resists the condensation that a cheaper metal spacer can draw in cold weather. On a low-pitched or flat unit, a self-cleaning outer coating works with ordinary weather instead of against it: sunlight breaks down organic dirt on the surface and the next shower of rain carries it off, so the pane stays clear without anyone climbing up to scrub it. Neither is something to add afterwards; both are specification choices made before the unit is ordered.

Double glazing is now the standard specification on most rooflights and roof windows, while triple glazing carries a little extra weight in exchange for holding heat in better, worth considering on a north-facing pitch or a loft room with no heating of its own.
A flat rooflight over a rear extension, common behind both the steelworks terraces and the New Town estates, needs a minimum fall of 1:80 under current Building Regulations so rain runs off rather than sitting against the glass.
An older unit that has already gone cloudy or streaked between the panes is generally better replaced than lived with, since the kerb and upstand beneath it are often still sound even where the sealed unit has failed.

Our guide to keeping rooflight glass clear covers spacers, coatings and pitch in more depth, and our misted and failed rooflight replacement page covers renewing a unit that has already lost its view. Where a flat roof extension is the job in hand, our flat roof rooflight installation page sets out kerbs, falls and upstands in more detail.

From survey to sightline sketch in Corby

Corby sits around 27 miles by road from Peterborough, comfortably within the 30 miles we cover from base. The order of work is the same wherever the roof sits: a survey of the actual building, a sightline sketch drawn from it, a quote, then the fitting itself.

The survey starts with the wall or roof structure the rooflight will actually sit in, coursed limestone in the Old Village, a steelworks-era terrace, a Holford-era council house, or a newer home at Oakley Vale or Prior's Hall, each behaving differently once a hole goes into it. The planning position gets confirmed for that address specifically, never assumed from what the rest of the street looks like. Then comes the sketch itself: not a product photo, but a drawing of what the sky will actually look like from wherever you spend time in that room, bed, sofa, desk or sink, marking exactly where the frame edge and any bar will land against it and how far the reveal eats into the view above.

Fitting comes last, made good so the finished roof reads as one piece rather than a visible patch, and the completed job carries a 10-year workmanship guarantee. For more on how the sketch gets drawn, see the sightline sketch page; for the things that actually move a quote up or down, from unit size to scaffolding and access, see our guide to rooflight costs. The Peterborough homepage lists every service we install and replace across the city and the towns around it.

Stone, steel and New Town roofs: what Corby homeowners ask

These are the questions that come up most from Corby's own mix of Old Village stone, steelworks terraces and New Town estates. If yours is not here, book a home visit or message us on WhatsApp.

Does the Old Village Conservation Area stop me getting a rooflight?

No. It means the position is checked before the product is, since being inside the conservation area removes some permitted development rights for roof alterations rather than banning them outright. A listed building on or near the High Street needs listed building consent as well, and we confirm that on the first visit.

My house is one of the 1930s steelworkers' terraces. Does that change what is possible?

It usually means a narrower, more standard rafter spacing than an Old Village cottage, which affects the size of opening a roof window or rooflight can take rather than ruling one out. We confirm the spacing on survey before the size and position go into the sightline sketch.

Will Building Control need to be involved in my job?

If the work counts as notifiable, we submit that notification ourselves rather than leaving it for you to chase. Every rooflight and skylight we fit in Corby, whether inside the Old Village Conservation Area or out on a New Town estate, goes in to current Building Regulations regardless of the planning position.

Do you cover the towns near Corby as well?

We do. There is a page for Oakham, and a full list on our areas we cover page, each with its own roof and planning notes.

Also near Corby

All the areas we cover

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