Rooflights and skylights in Somersham

Somersham grew up around the junction of two streets, High Street and Church Street, which cross at the old market place and are still marked today by a small pavilion and clock tower. That crossroads is the oldest working part of the village, but it is not the oldest thing that shaped it: for centuries before, the manor here belonged to the Bishops of Ely, who built a moated palace on the edge of the settlement and kept it as a residence from the 12th century onward.

The palace itself is long gone. It passed to the Crown in 1600, fell into disrepair under later owners and was pulled down in the mid-18th century, leaving only a bridge over the moat and a length of 16th-century garden wall on a site now protected as a scheduled monument. What that demolition means for a rooflight quote today is simple: almost nothing standing in Somersham is older than that clearance. The village largely rebuilt itself afterwards in brick, mostly gault brick under slate roofs, with red brick and plain clay tile used alongside it, and that later brick stock, not the vanished palace, is what any new rooflight has to be planned around.

A rooflight is the one window you look up through rather than out of, and what actually stands between a bed, a landing or a kitchen table and open sky comes down to the frame, the bar and the reveal chosen for that particular roof, not the size printed on a brochure. Before any brick is touched on a Somersham job, we draw that view as it will look from where you sit or lie, so the quote shows the sky you will get rather than a generic diagram.

Two rows of late-Victorian gault brick terraced housing stand on the north side of Rectory Lane and at either end of it, brick built well after the bishop's palace had already been cleared from the village. That timing matters: one local account of Somersham's history notes it is not a village full of ancient buildings, and most of what stands today, Rectory Lane's rows included, dates from a rebuilding that followed the 18th-century demolition rather than from anything older.

Later brick like this tends to carry more regular roof pitches and slightly more headroom than the village's oldest cottages, which usually makes a straightforward roof window set between the existing rafters the simplest route for a loft bedroom or a home office. Where a Victorian terrace roof is being reworked more fully, perhaps to bring an existing small skylight up to a size that actually opens the room to the sky, the opening itself is what changes, and that is a structural job as much as a glazing one, planned around the rafters either side rather than the glass alone.

• A bedroom under a Rectory Lane roof, where the view is straight up from the pillow.
• A landing lit only from above, seen at an angle from the stairs.
• A rear kitchen extension behind an older High Street front, where the sky is framed from a chair at the table.
• A bathroom under a sloping ceiling, often the tightest roof shape in the house.

Somersham sits on low, flat ground at the edge of the fens, the kind of setting shared by most of Huntingdonshire's fen-edge villages, where rooflines rarely climb high enough to cut into each other's view of the sky. A pavement plaque on the High Street marks the Greenwich Meridian line, the line of zero longitude fixed by the October 1884 conference, running straight through the village on its way from Greenwich to the pole. It is a small marker, but it says something true about the place: this is flat, open ground, and a roof here is rarely competing against a hill or a taller neighbour for its share of sky.

That openness is exactly what a well-placed rooflight can make the most of. Where the roof itself is not the obstruction, the frame edge, the bar and the reveal are what decide how much of that flat, wide sky reaches a bed, a sofa or a sink, which is why we draw a sightline sketch for the actual seat or pillow in the room rather than measure only against the roof from outside.

Whether the roof in question is a gault brick terrace on the High Street, a Rectory Lane Victorian row or a 1720s Parkhall Road rebuild, we start from inside the room rather than the roof: where you will actually be lying, sitting or standing when you look up. From there we check the building itself, listed, within the conservation boundary, or neither, against Huntingdonshire District Council's position for that specific address, because guessing from a house's age has caught people out before.

Only once that is settled do we draw the sightline sketch that goes out with the quote, showing the unit against the flashing or upstand the roof needs, the lining shape and the glazing chosen for it, so any consent that is required is sorted before a single tile comes off. On the fitting days themselves, slate, tile or brick around the opening is lifted and set aside for reuse, the rafters either side are worked around to form the opening, the frame or upstand goes in with its flashing, and the roof is made good to match the coursing on either side of it. Everything is fitted to current Building Regulations, the Building Control notification is handled on your behalf where the work needs one, and the finished job carries our 10-year workmanship guarantee.

What any of this costs turns on the unit itself, the roof it is going into, the lining, and how easily the roof can be reached, with conservation-area paperwork adding its own layer on top of the fitting. Our costs page breaks down what moves that price, and the Peterborough homepage lists the villages and towns, St Ives among them, that sit within the wider area we cover.